402 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



study, and the highest rewards have awaited those who 

 should make any notable contribution towards the ad- 

 vancement of knowledge. But, notwithstanding all the 

 educational advantages our people have enjoyed and all 

 the encouragement they have received to achieve some- 

 thing of supreme excellence, our great country with its 

 teeming millions attracted from the most gifted nations of 

 the Old World has not yet produced a single man who 

 has attained the highest rank in either literature or art or 

 science. Far from having a preeminent master of song 

 like Homer or Dante, we have not even a poet approaching 

 Goethe or Tasso or Camoens. We have no Cervantes, no 

 Milton, no Racine, no Moliere. America has produced no 

 Raphael or Michaelangelo ; no Mozart or Wagner or 

 Tschaikovsky. Nor has it given us a Descartes, a Leibnitz, 

 a Newton or a Darwin. Would any one, from this com- 

 plete absence in America of representatives of the highest 

 order in literature, art and science, ever dream of con- 

 cluding that we shall never have such favorite sons of 

 genius and such giants of intellect? Does our compara- 

 tive intellectual sterility in the past, and in a country 

 which seemed specially adapted to foster genius and attain- 

 ments of the highest order, justify any one in inferring that 

 the days of great geniuses, like the days of demigods, 

 are gone never to return ? 



And yet the number of men in our broad common- 

 wealth who, during the past hundred years, have enjoyed 

 such signal opportunities for attaining distinction in every 

 domain of intellectual effort is incomparably greater than 

 that of all the women so favored since the earliest days of 

 human history. If, from the first flowering of Greek 

 culture to the present day, as many millions of women 

 had enjoyed all the transcendent advantages of education 

 as have been in the United States so lavishly accorded to 

 the same number of millions of men, who will say that 

 very many of them would not have attained a much higher 



