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SCIENTIFIC WOOING.

I WAS a youth of studious mind,
Fair Science was my mistress kind,
And held me with attraction chemic
No germs of Love attacked my heart,
Secured as by Pasteurian art
Against that fatal epidemic.

For when my daily task was o`er
I dreamed of H2SO4,
While stealing through my slumbers placid
Came Iodine, with violet fumes,
And Sulphur, with its yellow blooms,
And whiffs of Hydrochloric Acid.

My daily visions, thoughts, and schemes
With wildest hope illumed my dreams,
The daring dreams of trustful twenty:
I might accomplish my desire,
And set the river Thames on fire
If but Potassium were in plenty!

Constance Naden.

Poet and philosopher. Constance Caroline Woodhill Naden was born in January 1858 in Edgbaston, Birmingham. From the age of eight she went to a local Unitarian day-school, developing her skills as a painter. On leaving school at sixteen she submitted some of her paintings to the Birmingham Society of Artists, but on their rejection she turned her attention to the study of philosophy and languages. From 1879 she attended the Birmingham and Midlands Institute, studying botany. She extended her interests in scientific matters more widely, particularly from 1881 through courses at Mason College and membership of the Birmingham Natural History Society. The teachings of Herbert Spencer were particularly attractive to her and she adopted the principles of social Darwinism in her subsequent writing.

On the death of her grandmother in 1887 Constance inherited a fortune and was able to embark upon a foreign tour, with a friend, taking in Constantinople, Palestine, Egypt and India. On her return to England in June 1888 she settled in London and entered into scientific society life. She also lectured on matters of women`s suffrage. Her health was to soon fail, however, and died on Christmas Eve, 1889 following an operation. She was buried at Key Hill Cemetery, Hockley, Birmingham .

Many of the poems by Constance Naden (1858-1889) focus on exploring the intersectionsof poetry and science, an intriguing effort given that at the end of the Victorianperiod, these were assumed to be opposite enterprises. Even more interesting isthe fact that despite cultural assumptions about science being the province of the masculinemind, Naden`s work both purposefully asserts the ability of women to engagewith science and challenges the Victorian cultural tendency to offer `scientific` justificationsfor notions of female intellectual inferiority. This essay examines the quartet ofpoems called `Evolutional Erotics,` the work of hers that has generally garnered attentionin the small flurry of scholarly activity recently focused on Naden, against thelarger context of her Complete Poetical Works (1894). In these four witty, playful poems,Naden uses the languages of science-evolution, botany, chemistry, physics-to createmetaphors and conceits through which to explore the courtships of four fictional couples.Taken together with her long poems, Naden`s work presents heterosexual lovematchesthat interrogate the triangulated relationship between science, poetry, andBritish Victorian gender-based expectations. Largely through her invocation ofCharles Darwin`s ideas of evolution, and in verse resembling that of Erasmus Darwin inits conjunction of science and human sexuality, Naden uses her poetry to model thenecessary fluidity of disciplinary boundaries. Moreover, in merging the `male` scientificmind with a feminist poetics, Naden is a writer-and, by implication, posits areader-whose facility with both science and poetics indicates an evolutionary step towardrespecting women`s intellect.

NATURAL SELECTION.

I HAD found out a gift for my fair,
I had found where the cave-men were laid
Skull, femur, and pelvis were there,
And spears, that of silex they made.

But he ne`er could be true, she averred,
Who would dig up an ancestor`s grave--
And I loved her the more when I heard
Such filial regard for the Cave.

My shelves, they are furnished with stones
All sorted and labelled with care,
And a splendid collection of bones,
Each one of them ancient and rare

One would think she might like to retire
To my study--she calls it a `hole!`
Not a fossil I heard her admire,
But I begged it, or borrowed, or stole.

But there comes an idealess lad,
With a strut, and a stare, and a smirk
And I watch, scientific though sad,
The Law of Selection at work.

Of Science he hasn`t a trace,
He seeks not the How and the Why,
But he sings with an amateur`s grace,
And he dances much better than I.

And we know the more dandified males
By dance and by song win their wives--
`Tis a law that with Aves prevails,
And even in Homo survives.

Shall I rage as they whirl in the valse?
Shall I sneer as they carol and coo?
Ah no! for since Chloe is false,
I`m certain that Darwin is true