FUTURE OF WOMEN IN SCIENCE 403 



rank in science, as well as in art and literature, than has 

 yet been reached by any man that America has yet pro- 

 duced? Who even, on the evidence now available, would 

 be warranted in denying that at least some of these mil- 

 lions of women might have attained the very highest rank 

 in every department of intellectual achievement? 



Gray, in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 

 muses on the potential statesmen and the "mute, inglori- 

 ous Miltons" of those countless multitudes who, for lack 

 of opportunity to develop their inborn gifts, were con- 

 demned to pass their lives in obscurity and die, "to For- 

 tune and to Fame unknown." But how much more truth- 

 fully could his words have been applied to that much 

 larger number of women of rare mental powers to whose 

 eyes knowledge 



"Her ample page 

 Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll," 



and whose God-given genius was ruthlessly suppressed 

 from the cradle to the grave? 



We are still in ignorance as to many of the conditions 

 which are essential to the development of genius and 

 which contribute to its loftiest flights. We have yet to 

 learn how far the efflorescence of the human mind is aided 

 and modified by heredity, environment, atmosphere, as 

 well as by education, encouragement and other stimuli 

 equally potent. 



But we do know that Germany, in spite of its famed 

 universities and its feverish intellectual activity in many 

 departments of knowledge, had to wait many long dreary 

 centuries before it could point to a Goethe, a Schiller, a 

 Humboldt, a Bach, or a Beethoven. We know that France 

 so long the reputed center of culture has so far pro- 

 duced no great epic poet, no Cervantes, no Murillo. But 

 shall we affirm that she will never give to the world im- 

 perishable works like Paradise Lost, Don Quixote or the 



