168 THE POP.ULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ing into the open jaws of the Cerastes herns and the Clotho arietas, 

 and, according to Burineister, also of certain pythons. But more prob- 

 ably the superstition is nothing but a product of that myth making 

 faculty that evolves a queer egg into a basilisk, and supplements a 

 strange death by a still stranger resurrection. A correspondent of 

 " Home and Farm " describes a number of brittle snakes and inverte- 

 brate snake-like worms " as easily broken as tallow-candles, and about 

 as hard to mend." Lizards, too, break at the mere touch of a switch 

 and scamper off, leaving a tail-end wriggling in the grass. In some 

 phenomenon of that sort the wonder-mania of our miracle-fuddled an- 

 cestors may have seen a glorious chance for insulting common sense by 

 the elaboration of the joint-snake myth. 



THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMAN. 



By Mes. E. LYNN LINTON. 



ON all sides the woman question bristles with difficulties, and the 

 higher education is one of them. The excess of women over 

 men — reaching to not far from a million — makes it impossible for all 

 to be married — Mormonism not being our way out of the wood. At 

 the same time, this paucity of husbands necessitates the power of self- 

 support for those women of the unendowed classes who are left penni- 

 less on the death of the bread-winner, and who must work iT they would 

 eat. This power of self-support, again, must be based on broad and 

 honorable lines, and must include something that the world really wants 

 and is content to pay for. It must not be a kind of well-masked charity 

 if it is to serve the daughters of the professional class — women who 

 are emphatically gentle, not only by birth, but by that refinement of 

 habit and delicacy of sentiment which give the only true claim to the 

 comprehensive term of lady. These women must be able to do some- 

 thing which shall not lower their social status and which shall give 

 them a decent income. They must keep in line with their fathers and 

 brothers, and be as well-considered as they. Certainly, they have 

 always had the office of teachers ; but all can not be schoolmistresses 

 or governesses, and the continual addition made to the number of can- 

 didates for work demands, and has already opened, other avenues and 

 fresh careers. And — button this no one can help save women them- 

 selves — as teachers and governesses they are not generally treated as 

 on an equality with their employers, and are made to feel that to gain 

 money, even by their brains, lowers their social status and reduces 

 them perilously near to the level of the servants. As authoresses or 

 artists they may hold their own ; the glamour of " fame " and " genius " 

 gilding over the fact that they make their incomes and do not draw 

 them, and have nothing capitalized — not even their own reputations. 



