72 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



such conditions we are not surprised to be informed that 

 the girls, as well as the boys, learned to speak Latin as well 

 as their mother tongue. And listening, as they did, to the 

 daily discussions on art and literature by the most learned 

 men of a most learned age, it was inevitable that they 

 should acquire those vast stores of knowledge on all sub- 

 jects that so excite the astonishment of our less studious 

 women of to-day. 



With the daughters of the nobility it was the same. In 

 their youth they had, under the paternal roof, the benefit 

 of the instruction of the most eminent masters of the time. 

 And as they grew up their constant intercourse with 

 learned men and the part they took in all literary and 

 social assemblies, which were so prominent a feature of the 

 period, enabled them to complete their education under the 

 most favorable auspices, and to have, before they were out 

 of their teens, a fund of information on all subjects that 

 could not be obtained so well, even in the best of our mod- 

 ern institutions of learning. 



It was to these daughters of the elite ingenuce puellce 

 that Erasmus and Vives addressed their treatises on educa- 

 tion. They were the privileged class at whose disposition 

 were placed all the treasures of Greek and Latin letters. 

 It was, then, an easy matter for them to write poetry and 

 dissertations in the languages of Horace and Plato. And 

 it was often a necessity for them to speak Latin, for it was 

 then the universal language of the learned the language 

 that was understood everywhere in England as in Italy, 

 in Germany as in France, in Flanders as well as in Spain 

 and Portugal. 



It was then that The Republic of Letters was a reality as 

 never before; that the man of letters was, of a truth, "a 

 citizen of the world"; that his country was wherever the 

 cult of letters had priests or devotees. He was what the 

 ballad singer was during the Middle Ages, but with more 

 dignity and seriousness. He was the agent and represen- 



