4o6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



anxious to invest it in the new power company. The dividend was 

 the result of a liquidation of the Gold from Sea Water Company, 

 and represented half of her original sum. She had come out of 

 one delusion with a loss of half of her property, and was now 

 ready to enter another one with the remaining half. It was an 

 old-fashioned notion that women should be kept in ignorance of 

 business, for business knowledge, it was thought, was the concern 

 of the husbands. This notion prevails still in some quarters, and 

 there may be some connection between the number of women in 

 Christian Science temples and their lack of education in practical 

 matters, or in what may be called the legal business habit — a habit 

 which weighs the probabilities of this and that, and leads to ways 

 of exact thinking. 



One of the remedies for this proneness of women to invest in 

 scientific bubbles, to invest money on faith, is the lack of exact 

 training, which is not acquired by them either in private schools 

 or colleges. The classes of philosophy and psychology in women's 

 colleges are crowded, while those in the exact sciences have only 

 handfuls. This remark also applies to the students in men's col- 

 leges, and we realize in this respect how closely college women imi- 

 tate college men. They follow the latter also in the habit of taking 

 lecture courses, a custom which increases vagueness, inaccuracy of 

 thought, and looseness of statement. This choice of studies by the 

 young women in their colleges is a serious question for mankind, 

 in view of the speculative spirit which the feminine sex show toward 

 scientific bubbles and schemes which promise an inordinate rate 

 of interest; for the graduates of these colleges will become teachers 

 of youth, and if not teachers they have an influence upon the com- 

 ing citizen during his formative period. As teachers they will far 

 outnumber men teachers, and they are fast coming into competi- 

 tion with men also in the routine of business offices and in certain 

 positions in commercial houses. In these activities they will need 

 a balance of judgment, exactness of thought, and business habits. 

 They should be given a sufficient knowledge of the elements of 

 physical science to know that power can not be created from noth- 

 ing, and that the great mass of our knowledge of mechanics and of 

 the relation of electricity to mechanics can not be overturned by 

 any new discovery. AVhatever is discovered must be related to 

 what has preceded it. This is a characteristic of a science, and this 

 is what distinguishes it from a delusion — namely, the great body 

 of related facts put upon a mechanical basis, so that any fact can 

 be substantiated and any phenomenon repeated. When this latter 

 test is applied to many of the isms of the day they fade into thin 

 air, and young women need especially to be taught to apply such 



