---
title: "Science in the Enlightenment"
chunk: 6/7
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_Enlightenment"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:40:33.858689+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Despite these limitations, there was support for women in the sciences among some men, and many made valuable contributions to science during the 18th century. Two notable women who managed to participate in formal institutions were Laura Bassi and the Russian Princess Yekaterina Dashkova. Bassi was an Italian physicist who received a PhD from the University of Bologna and began teaching there in 1732. Dashkova became the director of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg in 1783. Her personal relationship with Empress Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1796) allowed her to obtain the position, which marked in history the first appointment of a woman to the directorship of a scientific academy. Eva Ekeblad became the first woman inducted into the Royal Swedish Academy of Science (1748).
More commonly, women participated in the sciences through an association with a male relative or spouse. Caroline Herschel began her astronomical career, although somewhat reluctantly at first, by assisting her brother William Herschel. Caroline Herschel is most remembered for her discovery of eight comets and her Index to Flamsteed's Observations of the Fixed Stars (1798). On August 1, 1786, Herschel discovered her first comet, much to the excitement of scientifically minded women. Fanny Burney commented on the discovery, stating that "the comet was very small, and had nothing grand or striking in its appearance; but it is the first lady's comet, and I was very desirous to see it." Marie-Anne Pierette Paulze worked collaboratively with her husband, Antoine Lavoisier. Aside from assisting in Lavoisier's laboratory research, she was responsible for translating a number of English texts into French for her husband's work on the new chemistry. Paulze also illustrated many of her husband's publications, such as his Treatise on Chemistry (1789).
Many other women became illustrators or translators of scientific texts. In France, Madeleine Françoise Basseporte was employed by the Royal Botanical Garden as an illustrator. Englishwoman Mary Delany developed a unique method of illustration. Her technique involved using hundreds of pieces of coloured-paper to recreate lifelike renditions of living plants. German born Maria Sibylla Merian along with her daughters including Dorothea Maria Graff were involved in the careful scientific study of insects and the natural world. Using mostly watercolor, gauche on vellum, She became one of the leading entomologists of the 18th century. Maria Sibylla and her daughter Dorothea traveled to Suriname to study the different life stages of insects there and the plants on which they lived. On their return, Merian published in 1705 the lavishly illustrated Metamorphosis Surinamensis.
Noblewomen sometimes cultivated their own botanical gardens, including Mary Somerset and Margaret Harley. Scientific translation sometimes required more than a grasp on multiple languages. Besides translating Newton's Principia into French, Émilie du Châtelet expanded Newton's work to include recent progress made in mathematical physics after his death.

== Disciplines ==

=== Astronomy ===
Building on the body of work forwarded by Copernicus, Kepler and Newton, 18th-century astronomers refined telescopes, produced star catalogues, and worked towards explaining the motions of heavenly bodies and the consequences of universal gravitation. Among the prominent astronomers of the age was Edmund Halley. In 1705, Halley correctly linked historical descriptions of particularly bright comets to the reappearance of just one, which would later be named Halley's Comet, based on his computation of the orbits of comets. Halley also changed the theory of the Newtonian universe, which described the fixed stars. When he compared the ancient positions of stars to their contemporary positions, he found that they had shifted. James Bradley, while attempting to document stellar parallax, realized that the unexplained motion of stars he had early observed with Samuel Molyneux was caused by the aberration of light. The discovery was proof of a heliocentric model of the universe, since it is the revolution of the earth around the sun that causes an apparent motion in the observed position of a star. The discovery also led Bradley to a fairly close estimate to the speed of light.
Observations of Venus in the 18th century became an important step in describing atmospheres. During the 1761 transit of Venus, the Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov observed a ring of light around the planet. Lomonosov attributed the ring to the refraction of sunlight, which he correctly hypothesized was caused by the atmosphere of Venus. Further evidence of Venus' atmosphere was gathered in observations by Johann Hieronymus Schröter in 1779.  The planet also offered Alexis Claude de Clairaut an opportunity to work his considerable mathematical skills when he computed the mass of Venus through complex mathematical calculations.
However, much astronomical work of the period becomes shadowed by one of the most dramatic scientific discoveries of the 18th century. On 13 March 1781, amateur astronomer William Herschel spotted a new planet with his powerful reflecting telescope. Initially identified as a comet, the celestial body later came to be accepted as a planet. Soon after, the planet was named Georgium Sidus by Herschel and was called Herschelium in France. The name Uranus, as proposed by Johann Bode, came into widespread usage after Herschel's death. On the theoretical side of astronomy, the English natural philosopher John Michell first proposed the existence of dark stars in 1783. Michell postulated that if the density of a stellar object became great enough, its attractive force would become so large that even light could not escape. He also surmised that the location of a dark star could be determined by the strong gravitational force it would exert on surrounding stars. While differing somewhat from a black hole, the dark star can be understood as a predecessor to the black holes resulting from Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.

=== Chemistry ===