134 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



and beyond compare in the laboratories and lecture rooms 

 of his great universities more irresistible, in his estima- 

 tion, than the Kaiser 's trained legions in battle array. 



It finally dawned upon the leaders of thought in the 

 Fatherland, as it had but shortly before dawned upon 

 philosophers and men of science in other lands, that the 

 reputed sexual difference in intelligence was not due to 

 difference in brain size or brain structure, or innate power 

 of intellect, but rather to some other factors which had 

 been neglected, or overlooked, as being unessential or of 

 minor importance. These factors, on further investiga- 

 tion, proved to be education and opportunity. 



As far back as 1869 that keen observer and philosopher, 

 John Stuart Mill, had expressed himself on the subject in 

 the following words : ' * Like the French compared with the 

 English, the Irish with the Swiss, the Greeks or Italians 

 compared with the German races, so women compared with 

 men may be found, on the average, to do the same things 

 with some variety in the particular kind of excellence. 

 But that they would do them fully as well, on the whole, 

 if their education and cultivation were adapted to correct- 

 ing instead of aggravating the infirmities incident to their 

 temperament, I see not the smallest reason to doubt." 1 



It would be difficult to find a better illustration of the 

 sluggishness of the male as compared with the female mind 

 than the tardiness of men of science in arriving at a sane 

 conclusion respecting the subject of this chapter. For five 

 hundred years ago Christine de Pisan arrived at the same 

 conclusion which the learned professors of Germany 

 reached only in the last decade of the nineteenth century. 

 Discussing in La Cite des Dames the question at issue she 

 writes as follows: "I say to thee again, and doubt never 

 the contrary, that if it were the custom to put the little 

 maidens to the school, and they were made to learn the 

 sciences as they do to the men-children, that they should 

 i The Subjection of Women, p. 91, London, 1909. 



