GREAT RARITY OF FEMALE DISCOVERERS. 283 



of onr discoveries as cannot be traced directly to analysis 

 are almost always due to habits of general observation 

 which lead us to take note of some fact apparently quite 

 remote from what it helps us to arrive at. One of the 

 best instances of this indirect utility of habitual obser- 

 vation, as it is one of the earliest, is what occurred to 

 Archimedes in his bath. When the water displaced by 

 his body overflowed, he noticed the fact of displacement, 

 and at once perceived its applicability to the cubic 

 measurement of complicated bodies. It is possible that if 

 his mind had not been exercised at the time about the 

 adulteration of the royal crown, it would not have been 

 led to anything by the overflowing of his bath, but the 

 capacity to receive a suggestion of that kind is, I believe, 

 a capacity exclusively masculine. A woman would have 

 noticed the overflowing, but she would have noticed it 

 only as a cause of disorder or inconvenience.' 



' This absence of the investigating and discovering 

 tendencies in women is confirmed by the extreme rarity 

 of inventions due to women, even in the things which most 

 interest and concern them. The stocking-loom and sewing- 

 machine are the two inventions which would most natu- 

 rally have been hit upon by women, for people are 

 naturally inventive about the things which relieve them- 

 selves of labour, or which increase their own possibilities 

 of production ; and yet the stocking-loom and the sewing- 

 machine are both of them masculine ideas carried out to 

 practical efficiency by masculine energy and perseverance. 

 So I believe that all the improvements in pianos are due 

 to men, though women have used pianos much more than 

 men have used them.' * 



1 Hamerton, Intellectual Life, p. 243 et se$. 



