332 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tlie demand for higher education. These institutions are all but 

 one private, and three of them — one in Leipsic, one in Berlin, and 

 a third, opened in October, 1898, in Konigsberg — are called "gym- 

 nasial courses," and are for girls who have finished the girls' high 

 school, and who must pass entrance examinations in order to be 

 received into them. 



There has been for some time a girls' gymnasium which corre- 

 sponds exactly to those for boys in Carlsruhe, under the auspices 

 of the " Society for Reform in the Education of Women," which 

 receives girls of twelve who must have finished the six lower 

 classes of a girls' school. This society, to which the girls of Ger- 

 many owe much, is planning to open another gymnasium in Han- 

 nover, to which girls will be received from the junior class of the 

 girls' high school; the course of study will occupy five years, and 

 will fit girls for the same official examinations as the boys' gymnasia. 

 The language courses in the highest class will be elective, provid- 

 ing either for Greek or the modern languages, but Latin is oblig- 

 atory in all the classes. The girls from all these g^nnnasia are 

 debarred from taking any of the official examinations for which 

 their studies have prepared them. 



The next step in the matter of gymnasial education for girls 

 was what might have been expected. The people of the wide- 

 awake city of Breslau voted, by an overwhelming majority, to 

 establish a girls' gymnasium under the same laws and furnishing the 

 same advantages as the boys' g;^Tnnasia. The completed plan 

 was sent to the Minister of Public Instruction in Berlin in Janu- 

 ary, 1898, for approval, w^th the intention of opening the gymna- 

 sium at Easter, for which twenty-six girls were already enrolled. 

 Herr Dr. Bosse, however, foreseeing the results such an undertak- 

 ing would involve, consulted the other departments of the minis- 

 try, and two months later a decided refusal came like a thunder- 

 bolt upon the people of Breslau. On the 30th of April, 1898, 

 Herr Dr. Bosse was called to account in the Reichstag for his action 

 in the matter, which he justified on the ground that Government 

 approval of girls' gymnasia would mean the acceptance of the 

 diploma for matriculation in the universities and the opening to 

 women of all Government professional examinations, and that to 

 have granted it would have been to take a step in the direction 

 of the modern movement for women which could never have been 

 recalled, and would open the lecture rooms of Germany in gen- 

 eral to women. He contended, further, that the founding of offi- 

 cial gymnasia for girls would delegate the existing girls' high 

 school to a secondary place, an institution which had been planned 

 thoughtfully by the Government for the purpose of educating 



