92 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



life, and in doing so he must abandon his old habits of life and 

 adopt those of our country. Thus, through labor an assimilation 

 takes place. This has been the process in our Northern and 

 Western States, which have received that great bulk of im- 

 migration during the century. 







WOMAN AS AN INVENTOR AND MANUFACTURER.* 



THE question has been seriously raised whether woman is 

 capable of important achievements as an inventor, and an 

 opinion actually exists and is held in good faith by some other- 

 wise intelligent persons that she is not. The Patent-Office records 

 have been searched to show that woman's modern work in in- 

 ventive art has been insignificant ; and occasionally, when some 

 woman's invention is announced, it is treated as something un- 

 usual and very remarkable. A perusal of Dr. O. T. Mason's nar- 

 rative of Woman's Share in Primitive Culture should convince 

 the unprejudiced reader that this is a most shallow view to take 

 of the matter. In that book she is shown to be the earliest in- 

 ventor, and is proved in numberless cases to be the author from 

 the most ancient times of the most important inventions and 

 those which have contributed most to human well-being. 



From the primitive age when the division of duties was first 

 made between man and woman (somewhat roughly drawn, it is 

 true, as the rudeness of the then existing conditions compelled) 

 but substantially along the lines it has followed among all peo- 

 ples who labor, woman's ingenuity has been an important ele- 

 ment of progress. As the food-bringer, which is the character 

 under which Dr. Mason first presents her, "to feed the flock under 

 her immediate care, woman had to become an inventor, and it is 

 in this activity of her mind that she is specially interesting here. 

 The hen scratches for her chicks all day long because Nature has 

 furnished her hoes and rakes and cutting apparatus upon her 

 body. But here stands a creature on the edge of time who had to 

 create the implements of such industry." In the search for food 

 materials she first appears as taking fruits and other parts of 

 plants that are ready for consumption without further prepara- 

 tion. Next she took a stick and carrying basket and sought out 

 roots and other parts that might be prepared by roasting or per- 

 haps by boiling with hot stones. " On her third journey she gath- 

 ered seeds of all kinds, but especially the seeds of grasses, which at 



* Woman's Share in Primitive Culture. By Otis Tufton Mason. Anthropological Series, 

 No. 1. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1894. 



