338 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



among the nations of the world than has the art whose 

 chief tools are the needle and the bobbin in the deft hands 

 of a beauty-loving woman. If the name of the first lace- 

 maker had not been lost in the mists of antiquity, it is 

 reasonable to suppose that she, too, would long since have 

 had a monument erected to her memory, as well as the 

 weavers of silk and makers of attar of roses and cashmere 

 shawls. She was surely as deserving of such an honor. 



More conclusive information respecting woman as an 

 inventor is, strange as it may appear, afforded by a sys- 

 tematic study of the various races of mankind which are 

 still in a state of savagery. Such a study discloses the 

 interesting fact that woman, contrary to the declaration of 

 Proudhon, has not only been the inventor of the distaff, 

 but that she has furthermore pace Voltaire been the 

 inventor of all the peaceful arts of life, and the inventor, 

 too, of the earliest forms of nearly all the mechanical 

 devices now in use in the world of industry. 



Architecture, as well as many other things, was credited 

 by the ancient Greeks to Minerva. This was a poetical 

 way of stating the fact now generally accepted by men of 

 science that women were the first homemakers. But the 

 first home was a very simple and a very humble structure. 

 When not a cave, it was a simple shelter made of bark or 

 skins, sufficient to afford protection to the mother and her 

 child. Subsequently it was a lodge made of earth, of stone 

 or wattle work or adobe. 



Women were, in the light of anthropology, as well as in 

 that of mythology and tradition, the first to discover the 

 nutritive and medicinal values of fruits, seeds, nuts, roots 

 and vegetables. They were consequently the first garden- 

 ers and agriculturists and the first to build up a materia 

 medica. While men were engaged in the chase or in war- 

 fare, women were gradually perfecting those divers domes- 

 tic arts which, in the course of time, became their recog- 

 nized specialties. They soon found that it was better to 



