MENTAL DIFFERENCES OF MEN AND WOMEN 395 



not, as is probable, to advance with a speed relatively accelerated by 

 the momentum of its already acquired velocity), it must take many 

 centuries for heredity to produce the missing five ounces of the female 

 brain. 



In conclusion, a few words may be added on the question of female 

 education as this actually stands at the present time. Among all the 

 features of progress which will cause the present century to be regarded 

 by posterity as beyond comparison the most remarkable epoch in the 

 history of our race, I believe that inauguration of the so-called woman's 

 movement in our own generation, will be considered one of the most 

 important. For I am persuaded that this movement is destined to 

 grow ; that with its growth the highest attributes of one half of the 

 human race are destined to be widely influenced ; that this influence 

 will profoundly react upon the other half, not alone in the nursery and 

 the drawing-room, but also in the study, the academy, the forum, and 

 the senate ; that this latest yet inevitable wave of mental evolution 

 can not be stayed until it has changed the whole aspect of civiliza- 

 tion. In an essay already alluded to, Sydney Smith has remarked, 

 though not quite correctly, that up to his time there had been no 

 woman who had produced a single notable work, either of reason or 

 imagination, whether in English, French, German, or Italian literature. 

 A few weeks ago Mrs. Favvcett was able to show us that since then 

 there have been at least forty women who have left a permanent 

 mark in English literature alone. Now this fact becomes one of great 

 significance when we remember that it is the result of but the earli- 

 est phase of the woman's movement. For, as already indicated, this 

 movement is now plainly of the nature of a ferment. When I was 

 at Cambridge, the then newly-established foundations of Girton and 

 Newnham were to nearly all of us matters of amusement. But we 

 have lived to alter our views ; for we have lived to see that that was 

 but the beginning of a great social change, which has since spread, 

 and is still spreading, at so extraordinary a rate that we are now 

 within measurable distance of the time when no English lady will be 

 found to have escaped its influence. It is not merely that women's 

 colleges are springing up like mushrooms in all quarters of the king- 

 dom, or that the old type of young ladies' governess is being rapidly 

 starved out of existence. It is of much more importance even than 

 this that the immense reform in girls' education, which has been so 

 recently introduced by the Day-Schools Company working in con- 

 junction with the University Board and local examinations, has al- 

 ready shaken to its base the whole system, and even the whole ideal, 

 of female education, so that there is scarcely a private school in the 

 country which has not been more or less affected by the change. In 

 a word, whether we like it or not, the woman's movement is upon 

 us ; and what we have now to do is to guide the flood into what 



