A RARE honour for a Scot was achieved yesterday when Google made its doodle of the day a tribute to Mary Somerville, the 19th-century writer for whom the word “scientist” was coined.

Google’s tribute to Mary, “Queen of Science” came on the 194th anniversary of her work being first read by the Royal Society of London, itself a huge honour at a time when women were actively discouraged from the sciences.

National readers with good memories will recall that we profiled Somerville when the new Royal Bank of Scotland polymer £10 note came out – it features a picture of Somerville and her home town of Burntisland.

She was actually born in Jedburgh as Mary Fairfax in the house of her uncle on Boxing Day, 1780. She was the daughter of Commander William Fairfax RN who would later go on to become an admiral and be knighted. Her mother was Margaret Charters, daughter of Samuel Charters, the Solicitor of Customs for Scotland.

Growing up in Burntisland, she received the basic education of the three Rs, but was eventually allowed to attend a boarding school where she studied French, Italian, mathematics, music and dance. Her uncle Thomas Somerville gave Mary access to his comprehensive library and she taught herself Latin and Greek, to the despair of her father who said to her mother: “Peg, we must put a stop to this, or we shall have Mary in a straitjacket one of these days.”

Mary married her cousin Samuel Greig on June 24, 1804, and it was a good match for Mary as Greig was a captain in the Russian Navy and was made naval commissioner and vice-consul in London where Mary soon proved a capable hostess as well as a voracious seeker after knowledge.

Greig died in 1807, and Mary and her children went to live in Edinburgh where her inheritance from her late husband allowed her to seek a proper education.

Five years after Greig’s death, Mary married another cousin, army doctor William Somerville and having had two sons with Greig, now had two daughters with Somerville. He, like his father, was a strong believer in education for women and when they moved to London in 1816, Mary was able to meet and learn from the leading thinkers of the day, conversing with them knowledgably.

James David Forbes, later to become the principal of the University of St Andrews, was in London at the time and wrote about her: “Below middle size, fair, countenance not particularly expressive except eyes which are piercing. Short-sighted. Manners the simplest possible. Her conversation very simple and pleasing. Simplicity not showing itself in abstaining from scientific subjects with which she is so well acquainted, but in being ready to talk on them all with the naiveté of a child and the utmost apparent unconsciousness of the rarity of such knowledge as she possesses, so that it requires a moment’s reflection to be aware that one is hearing something very extraordinary from the mouth of a woman.”

Sexist, perhaps, but indicative of the impression Somerville was making through her best-selling books on developments in science, including her own prediction that a new planet would be found beyond Saturn.

She would go on to be expert in the fields of astronomy, cosmology, mathematics, physics, and geography, but above all it was her wonderful writing on scientific subjects which earned her fame and renown, not to mention a £300 per annum pension from the Government in recognition of her work in popularising science.

Google concluded its tribute thus: “Despite being largely self-taught, Somerville succeeded in making a name for herself in a world largely dominated by men. Her achievements led John Stuart Mill to ask Somerville to be the first person to add her name to the (unsuccessful) petition for women’s suffrage that he presented to Parliament in 1868.

“After her death in 1872, Somerville College, which welcomed women when they were barred from Oxford University, was named after her because of her strong support for women’s education.”

In her obituary in the Morning Post, Somerville was described as the “Queen of Science” – not a bad upgrade from scientist.