75 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It would be alarming, if we could believe with. Mr. Allen in any- 

 thing so unflattering to masculine endeavor ; but, unfortunately, 

 there are no statistics to prove whether this is due to dulled femi- 

 nine instinct, or to the failure of man to make love at the right 

 time. In the interim, from collateral evidence, the latter cause 

 appears more trustworthy. 



IV. If freedom from Mrs. Grundy is desirable, it is patent 

 that education and independence are gradually liberating woman. 

 The counter-charge is often made that the educated woman is too 

 regardless of that favored deity. 



From a biological point of view, Mr. Allen endows four years 

 of college training with enormous potentiality. In this he evi- 

 dently follows the eminent leader, Mr. Herbert Spencer, who 

 asserts that the infertility of " upper-class girls " in England is 

 due to " overtaxing of their brains " ! * Whether the majority of 

 English " upper-class girls " are educated to that extreme point, 

 and whether the question is not begged in the use of the word 

 "overtaxation," may be left to the reader. It is strange that 

 powerful heredity and palpable causes of race deterioration 

 should be ignored by physiologists f in order to throw the onus 

 of this accusation upon mental culture. Insurance tables are 

 made out more scientifically than this forecast of a girl's future. 

 If in education, or in the industrial independence of women, there 

 existed any tendency toward infertility, it would be barely dis- 

 coverable in our generation, little more so in the next, and possi- 

 bly in the third generation something might be ascertained from 

 careful statistics following Mr. Galton's method. Nature does 

 not retrograde so rapidly. There is nothing to warrant the as- 

 sumption that four years of altered food, training, or environ- 

 ment, not interfering with good physical condition, could obliter- 

 ate an instinct or function. Investigation corroborates this. 

 Even in England, we learn that infertility and higher education 

 are not synonymous terms. A teacher of wide experience states : \ 

 " I know several families of children whose mothers were among 

 the pioneers of the movement now so savagely attacked. . . . 

 Among my friends, not a few sturdy, handsome children, whose 

 mothers underwent severe study in their earlier days. One of 

 these was a lady who, with one other, was the first woman to 

 take the classical tripos, and whose degree was not beaten, I 

 think, for ten years." In America, in "a report given of the 

 family conditions of one hundred and thirty aluinnse who have 



* " Principles of Biology." 



t Similar premature judgment was given by the late Dr. E. H. Clarke, of Boston, in 

 1871, "Sex and Education." See also "Woman's Work in Creation," Dr. B. W. Richard- 

 son, "Longman's Magazine," October, 1886. 



% "Woman and Work," p. 116. 



