394 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



ing worthy of note because, forsooth, their names are not 

 found on the rolls of membership of the Koyal Society or 

 the French Academy of Sciences associations whose con- 

 stitutions have been purposely so framed as to exclude 

 women from membership. It would, indeed, be difficult to 

 instance a more unfair or a more unscientific test of 

 woman's eminence in science, and that, too, proposed by 

 one who is supposed to be actuated in his judgments by 

 rigorously scientific methods. Had any of the women 

 named belonged to the male sex, there never would have 

 been any question of their fitness to become members of 

 the societies in question. This is particularly true of Mme. 

 Curie, who, in the estimation of the world, has done more 

 to enhance the prestige of French science than any man 

 of the present generation a statement that is sufficiently 

 justified by the fact that she is the only one so far who has 

 twice, in competition with the greatest of the world's men 

 of science, succeeded in carrying away the great Nobel 

 prize. 1 



iA writer in the English magazine, Nature, under date of Janu- 

 ary 12, 1911, when the European press was discussing Mme. Curie's 

 claims to membership in the French Academy of Sciences, makes the 

 following sane observations on the admission of women to the various 

 academies of the French Institute: 



" There may be room for difference of opinion as to the wisdom 

 or expediency of permitting women to embark on the troubled sea 

 of politics, or of allowing them a determinate voice in the settle- 

 ment of questions which may affect the existence or the destiny of 

 a nation; but surely there ought to be no question that in the peace- 

 ful walks of art, literature and science, there should be the freest 

 possible scope extended to them, and that, as human beings, every 

 avenue to distinction and success should unreservedly be open to them. 



"All academies tend to be conservative and to move slowly; 

 they are the homes of privilege and of vested interest. Some of them 

 incline to be reactionary. They were created by men for men and 

 for the most part at a time when women played little or no part 

 in those occupations which such societies were intended to foster and 

 develop. But the times have changed. Women have gradually won 

 for themselves their rightful position as human beings. We have 



