i 5 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



selves, either saying nothing of it, or representing it, with half-uncon- 

 scious guile, as the cream of intellectual sweetness. The inquisitive 

 man who went into a side-show on the invitation of the showman, to 

 see a wagon with one wheel, and saw a wheelbarrow, came out, Mr. 

 Joe Miller avers, with such enthusiasm in his eyes and such laudation 

 on his lips that the bystanders rushed pell-mell to view the marvel, 

 from which they, too, returned in a sfate of misleading effusiveness. 

 Something must be pardoned to the spirit of getting even ; but more, 

 I should own in candor, to an honest belief in the marvel extolled. 

 Nothing in fact can be more natural than to exaggerate the value of 

 that which has cost us dear, particularly when it is avouched to be in- 

 valuable by the practice of venerable institutions, and the authority of 

 illustrious names, not to mention the prescription of centuries. Such, 

 I think, are the chief things which have conspired with the bell-wether 

 bias, to keep up the long, and senseless, and injurious pursuit of free 

 development in the fetters of the ancients. 



Be this explanation as it may, it is high time, and past high time, 

 that the pursuit under these conditions were abandoned. It has been 

 continued ages too long. If not abandoned, I am strongly tempted to 

 predict that man, handicapped by the conditions, will be passed by 

 woman, now almost abreast of him, and that before the end of the 

 next century, unless woman gets handicapped herself, our great poets, 

 novelists, historians, scientists, and philosophers the leaders of thought 

 and masters of style will wear petticoats or Turkish trousers, and the 

 lords of the creation, sent to the rear, will become hewers of words 

 and drawers of grammar to the weaker vessels their better-halves in 

 very truth the real architects of mind and acknowledged captains of 

 civilization. Let the paragon of animals look to his supremacy. If he 

 sticks to the dead languages, I see but one hope for him ; and that is 

 to persuade woman to accept for herself the chains that have been 

 fastened on him, and which he has not had the wit or the manliness 

 to break. This is his only hope, and the fortune of the tailless fox in 

 iEsop admonishes him not to put his trust in this ; although it must 

 be acknowledged, in view of the course of study at such institutions 

 as Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, and Girton, that the modern Reynard 

 seems to be crying up his mutilated extremity with somewhat greater 

 effect than his prototype of old was able to reach. But this, I hope, 

 is more in appearance than in reality. When he of the fable opened 

 his speech against tails, and proceeded with his ingenious reasoning, 

 there were present in the assembly doubtless a few silly foxes who 

 exchanged approving nods, hastily agreed that tails were inconven- 

 ient appendages, and perhaps went so far as to cut off their own 

 on the spot, and range themselves ostentatiously under the counte- 

 nance of the Great Tailless ; but when the speech, clever yet ex- 

 tremely thin, was finished, and the settled sense of the meeting 

 found a fitting voice, there was an end of all that nonsense. And 



