392 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



spite of what was considered taboo for their sex by the 

 usages and ordinances of society, that they were able to 

 attain that eminence in the most abstruse of the sciences 

 which won for them the plaudits of the world. Both were 

 virtually self-made women. Deprived of the advantages 

 of a college or university education, and denied the stimu- 

 lus afforded by membership in learned scientific associa- 

 tions, they nevertheless succeeded by their own unaided 

 efforts in winning a place of highest honor in the Walhalla 

 of men of science. 



M. Alphonse de Candolle, in his great work, Histoire des 

 Sciences et des Savants depuis Deux Siecles, devotes only 

 two pages to the consideration of woman in science. She 

 is, to him, a negligible quantity. And, although a pro- 

 fessed man of science, he repeats, without any scientific 

 warrant whatever, all the gratuitous statements of his pre- 

 decessors regarding the superficial character of the female 

 mind, "a mind," he will have it, which " takes pleasure 

 in ideas that are readily seized by a kind of intuition ; ' ' a 

 mind "to which the slow methods of observation and cal- 

 culation by which truth is surely arrived at are not pleas- 

 ing. Truths themselves, " the Swiss savant continues, "in- 

 dependent of their nature and possible consequences 

 especially general truths which have no relation to a par- 

 ticular person are of small moment to most women. Add 

 to this a feeble independence of opinion, a reasoning fac- 

 ulty less intense than in man, and, finally, the horror of 

 doubt, that is, a state of mind in which all research in the 

 sciences of observation must begin and often end. These 

 reasons are/ 7 according to de Candolle, "more than suffi- 

 cient to explain the position of women in scientific pur- 

 suits. >fl 



They certainly are more than sufficient to explain their 

 position if we choose to accept the author's method of de- 

 termining one's attainments in the realm of science. His 



i Histoire des Sciences et des Savants, p. 271, Gen&ve-Bale, 1885. 



