CAPACITY FOR SCIENTIFIC PURSUITS 129 



the highest prizes." In zoology, botany, physics, chemis- 

 try and mathematics they proved themselves the peers, and 

 frequently the superiors, of their male competitors. 



' ' The success of the female students disturbed, of course, 

 very much the preconceived notions of some people, who 

 had always taken for granted tkat the female intellect was 

 inferior to the male; and, not being able to combat the 

 stubborn facts that appeared from time to time in the news- 

 papers, when the results of the examinations were pub- 

 lished, they tried to account for them." 1 



These cavillers, however, soon discovered that there was 

 no way of accounting for the disconcerting fact which 

 confronted them, except by confessing that their theory 

 regarding the mental inferiority of women was not sub- 

 stantiated by fact. This unexpected demand for the uncon- 

 ditional surrender of their long-cherished theory of male 

 superiority was a crushing and humiliating blow to their 

 pride of intellect, but there was no remedy for it, nor was 

 it accompanied by any balm of consolation that they, at 

 the time, felt disposed to regard as adequate compensation 

 for their lost prestige a prestige which their overweening 

 sex had claimed from time immemorial. 



Similar experiments under even more trying conditions 

 were subsequently made in the United States and in other 

 parts of the world, and everywhere with the same results. 

 In the universities of Switzerland, France, England, Ger- 

 many and Russia women, when given a fair opportunity, 

 were able to demonstrate to the satisfaction of all unpreju- 

 diced judges that the long-vaunted superiority of the male 

 intellect was a myth; that intelligence, like genius, has 

 no sex. 



One of the most interesting and comprehensive investi- 

 gations ever undertaken regarding this long-debated ques- 

 tion was made some years ago by Arthur Kirchhoff, an 



1 The Study of Science by Women in the Contemporary Eeview 

 for March, 1869. 



