FUTURE OF WOMEN IN SCIENCE 397 



power or inferior intelligence. It does not prove as the 

 learned Frenchman and those who are similarly minded 

 would have us believe her incapacity for the highest 

 flights of genius in every sphere of intellectual effort. Such 

 assumptions are entirely negatived by woman's past 

 achievements in all departments of art, literature and 

 science. 



Far from making the inference that De Maistre wished 

 his daughter to draw from his letter, we should, from 

 what we know of woman's ability as disclosed in the fore- 

 going chapters, hesitate to set a limit to her powers, or 

 to declare apodictically that she could not have been the 

 author of works of as great merit as most of those if not 

 all of them mentioned as among men's supreme achieve- 

 ments. The simple fact that Mme. Curie and Sonya Kova- 

 levsky were able, in sciences usually considered beyond 

 female intelligence, to wrest from their male competitors 

 the most coveted prizes within the gift of the Nobel 

 Prize Commission and the French Academy of Sciences, 

 demonstrates completely that woman's assumed incapacity 

 for even the most recondite scientific pursuits is a mere 

 figment of the masculine imagination. 



What women have done "that at least, if nothing else," 

 as John Stuart Mill aptly observes, "it is proved they can 

 do. When we consider how sedulously they are all trained 

 away from, instead of being trained toward, any of the 

 occupations or objects reserved for men, it is evident that 

 I am taking very humble ground for them, when I rest 

 their case on what they have actually achieved. For, in 

 this case, negative evidence is worth little, while any posi- 

 tive evidence is conclusive. It cannot be inferred to be 

 impossible that a woman should be a Homer, or an Aris- 

 totle, or a Michaelangelo, or a Beethoven, because no 

 woman has yet actually produced works comparable to 

 theirs in any of those lines of excellence. This negative fact 

 at most leaves the question uncertain and open to psycho- 



