POLITICAL BIGHTS AND DUTIES OF WOMEN. 97 



athletic girls. Go up the Penobscot and live next winter in a 

 camp, and come back next spring balancing yourself with a pick- 

 pole on the floating, slippery logs you have cut. Go down into 

 the mines, and with your pickaxe and shovel dig coal and iron. 

 Offer your services at the going wages to run a locomotive, to 

 blast rocks, or handle dynamite. 



Men who are husbands, fathers, and sons will not say this or 

 anything like it. But when the lawyer finds his female competi- 

 tor by the charms of her beauty and eloquence winning his cli- 

 ents ; and the doctor, that the woman physician by her motherly 

 tenderness has seduced his patients ; and the minister, that some 

 reverend lady by her superior sanctity has supplanted him in his 

 parish ; and all men in all their vocations, high and low, by whose 

 toils they had gained bread for their families, are pressed with 

 the competition of those it had been their chief spur to industry 

 and their pride to maintain without the necessity of repulsive 

 work, will not the feeling become universal that men are released 

 from their obligations of duty and support toward the weaker sex ? 



The naturalists tell us that the human race acquired its strong 

 parental affections by performing the needed offices of care and 

 help which the prolonged infancy of its young so much longer 

 than among all lower animals made necessary. We know that 

 the tenderness, affection, and sympathy which are the essential 

 grace and charm of womanhood, as well as the courage, disinter- 

 estedness, and chivalric sentiment which form the nobility of 

 manhood, have sprung from that very relation of strong to weak, 

 protector and protected, which have for ages subsisted among all 

 the civilized races. What guarantee can they give us who are 

 seeking to destroy that relation, or at least the cause and reason 

 of its existence, that those cardinal virtues that adorn and dignify 

 both sexes will not be involved in its destruction ? For one, I 

 should not dare to vote to drag woman from the high estate in 

 which man honors himself in being her minister and servant, until 

 at least the intelligent majority of women deliberately express 

 their judgment in favor of a social change so consequential. 



Harvard College Observatory has adopted the plan of sending out 

 circulars to the scientific press and other interested parties, to announce 

 discoveries as they are made, and secure earlier publication of them. The 

 first of these circulars announces the discovery by Mrs. Fleming, from 

 examination of the Draper memorial photographs, of a new star, Nova 

 Carina, which appeared in the constellation Carina in the spring of 1895. 

 A comparison of its spectrum with those of Nova Aurigae and Nova Normae 

 shows close resemblance and apparent identity in essential features. Be- 

 tween April 8 and July 1, 1895, the photographic brightness of the star 

 appears to have diminished from the eighth to the eleventh magnitude. 

 vol. xxix. 9 



