FUTURE OF WOMEN IN SCIENCE 399 



not now be their intellectual efflorescence, if Plato's dream 

 of twenty-three centuries ago of giving women equal rights 

 with men in all things of the mind could have been realized ; 

 if those ardent female disciples of his, who so lovingly 

 followed him through the streets of Athens "the home 

 of the intellectual and the beautiful' ' and hung on his 

 lips during his matchless discourses in the groves of the 

 Academy and on the banks of the Ilyssus, could have con- 

 tinued that race of intellect and genius which was the ad- 

 miration and the inspiration of all Hellas during the most 

 brilliant period of its marvelous history? 



Speculating only on what the gifted daughters of Greece 

 might have achieved, we may easily believe that they 

 would have kept pace with their most highly gifted coun- 

 trymen, and that, following in the footsteps of Sappho 

 and the other Muses of the ' ' Terrestrial Nine, ' ' they would 

 have been worthy rivals of Homer, Pindar and ^Eschylus, 

 and would have occupied a prominent place in that bril- 

 liant galaxy of genius composed of such luminaries as 

 Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Euclid, Archimedes, Theophrastus, 

 Polygnotus, Diophantus, Pausanias and Thucydides. 



To those who base their opinions on what so long has 

 been the absurdly anomalous condition of women and who, 

 in formulating their theories of human progress, com- 

 pletely ignore the fundamental laws of heredity, such con- 

 jectures will seem extravagant, if not chimerical. But, 

 when one bears in mind the universal fact that offspring, 

 whatever the sex, inherits its characteristics and its powers 

 from both parents alike; that the soul, unlike the body, 

 has no sex, and that, so far as legitimate indications from 

 the teachings of biology and psychology can serve as a 

 guide, there is no valid reason for asserting the mental 

 superiority of man over woman, one will be obliged to 

 confess that these surmises are far from being either fanci- 

 ful or preposterous. 



It is then the veriest sophism to predicate woman's 



