MARIA, the eldest daughter of Heinrich Cunitz, a doctor of medicine in Silesia, was born about the beginning of the seventeenth century. She learned languages with amazing facility, and understood Polish, German, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. She attained a knowledge of the sciences with equal ease, and was skilled in history, physic, poetry, painting, and music: yet these were only her amusements; for she applied herself to the mathematics, and to astronomy, which she made her principal study, and in which she made such rapid and extensive progress that she was ranked amongst the ablest astronomers of her time.

Her astronomical tables, which gained for her a great reputation, were printed in Latin and German, and dedicated to the Emperor Ferdinand III. These tables, under the name of *Urania Propitia sive Tabula Astronomica*, were first printed at Oels in 1650, and afterwards at Frankfurt in the following year. She married a Dutch physician named Elias de Loewen, and died at Pitschen in 1664.