130 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



enterprising German journalist. 1 It consisted in collecting 

 and collaborating the opinions of more than a hundred of 

 the most distinguished professors of the Fatherland, be- 

 sides the opinions of a number of eminent writers and 

 teachers in girls' high schools. These constitute a volume 

 of nearly four hundred pages, and embody the views on 

 the capacity of woman for science of professors of theol- 

 ogy, jurisprudence, anatomy, physiology, surgery, psychol- 

 ogy, history, gynecology, psychiatry, philology, philosophy, 

 art, mathematics, physics, astronomy, chemistry, zoology, 

 botany, geology, paleontology and technology. The in- 

 vestigation, indeed, covered every branch of knowledge 

 and evoked the deliberate views of those who were looked 

 upon as the leading representatives of German thought and 

 culture. v 



This book possesses a special value from the fact that, 

 of all peoples in Europe, the Germans have been the most 

 refractory to the claims of women to be received at the 

 universities on the same footing as men. The German pro- 

 fessors, naturally, share the conservatism of their country- 

 men, and, like them, are wedded to routine when there is 

 question of introducing innovations into their social, po- 

 litical or educational systems. One would anticipate, then, 

 that, when called upon to give their honest opinions re- 

 specting the intellectual capacity of women, as compared 

 with that of men, their answer would be decidedly in 

 favor of the sterner sex. "For," they will ask, "have not 

 all the achievements in science which have given the Fath- 

 erland such prestige in the eyes of the world been due 

 entirely to men? Have the women of Germany ever under- 

 taken the solution of any great scientific problem, or have 



AJcademische Frau. Gutachten hervorragender Universitaten- 

 professoren, Frauenlehrer und Schriftsteller uber die Befahigung der 

 Frew, zum wissenschaftlichen Studium und Berufe herausgegeben von 

 'Arthur Kirchhoff, Berlin, 1897. 



