WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



work by strict scientific methods, they were in a better 

 position to express an opinion on the question at issue than 

 would, a few years previously, have been possible. 



Accordingly, even the declared enemies of the woman's 

 movement among the German professorate were forced to 

 admit the intellectual equality of the two sexes. For they, 

 too, as well as men of science in other parts of Europe, had 

 been measuring skulls and weighing brains ; they, too, had 

 been studying woman's mental caliber in the light of the 

 new psychology; they, too, had been watching her work 

 in the various departments of the university ; and, notwith- 

 standing all their observations and experiments, they were 

 unable to detect any difference between men and women in 

 brain organization or in intellectual capacity. And, as 

 might have been foreseen, results harmonized perfectly 

 with those arrived at by investigators in other parts of the 

 world namely, that in things of the mind there is perfect 

 sexual equality. 



Among the hundred and more professors whose opinions 

 are given in Herr Kirchhoff's book there were, of course, 

 a few who were not prepared to subscribe to the findings of 

 the great majority of their colleagues. But the reasons 

 they assign for dissent were, at least in some instances, little 

 better founded than that of a certain professor of chem- 

 istry in the University of Geneva, who, a few years ago, 

 gravely declared that women have no aptitude for science 

 because, forsooth, in chemical manipulations they break 

 more test-tubes than men. Verily, "a Daniel come to 

 judgment." 



What probably more deeply impressed the German pro- 

 fessors than anything else was the marked talent and taste 

 of many of the women students for the abstract sciences, 

 especially for the higher mathematics. For it had always 

 been asserted that these branches of knowledge were beyond 

 woman 's capacity and that she had an instinctive antipathy 

 for abstruse reasoning and for abstractions of all kinds. 



