4 oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



should never be attempted ; and that, as a girl is more liable than a 

 boy to insidiously undermine her constitution, every girl who aspires 

 to any distinction in the way of learning should be warned to be con- 

 stantly on the watch for the earliest symptoms of impairment. If these 

 reasonable precautions were to become as universal in the observance 

 as they now are in the breach, I believe it would soon stand upon the 

 unquestionable evidence of experimental proof, that there is no reason 

 in the nature of things why women should not admit of culture as 

 wide and deep and thorough as our schools and universities are able to 

 provide. 



The channels, therefore, into which I should like to see the higher 

 education of women directed are not those which run straight athwart 

 the mental differences between men and women which we have been 

 considering. These differences are all complementary to one another, 

 fitly and beautifully joined together in the social organism. If we 

 attempt to disregard them, or try arlifically to make of woman an un- 

 natural copy of man, we are certain to fail, and to turn out as our 

 result a sorry and disappointed creature who is neither the one thing 

 nor the other. But if, without expecting women as a class to enter 

 into any professional or otherwise foolish rivalry with men, for which 

 as a class they are neither physically nor mentally fitted, and if, as 

 Mrs. Lynn Linton remarks, we do not make the mistake of confusing 

 mental development with intellectual specialization if, without doing 

 either of these things, we encourage women in every way to obtain for 

 themselves the intrinsic advantages of learning, it is as certain as any- 

 thing can well be that posterity will bless us for our pains. For then 

 all may equally enjoy the privilege of a real acquaintance with letters ; 

 ladies need no longer be shut out from a solid understanding of music 

 or painting ; lecturers on science will no longer be asked at the close 

 of their lectures whether the cerebellum is inside or outside of the 

 skull, how is it that astronomers have been able to find out the names 

 of the stars, or whether one does not think that his diagram of a jelly- 

 fish serves with admirable fidelity to illustrate the movements of the 

 solar system. These, of course, I quote as extreme cases, and even as 

 displaying the prettiness which belongs to a child-like simplicity. But 

 simplicity of this kind ought to be put away with other childish things ; 

 and in whatever measure it is allowed to continue after childhood is 

 over, the human being has failed to grasp the full privileges of human 

 life. Therefore, in my opinion, the days are past when any enlight- 

 ened man ought seriously to suppose that in now again reaching forth 

 her hand to eat of the tree of knowledge, woman is preparing for the 

 human race a second fall. In the person of her admirable representa- 

 tive, Mrs. Fawcett, she thus pleads : " No one of those who care most 

 for the woman's movement cares one jot to prove or to maintain that 

 men's brains and women's brains are exactly alike or exactly equal. 

 All we ask is that the social and legal status of women should be such 



