WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



means more than doubling mankind's capacity for ad- 

 vancement. For the failure to utilize woman's vast ener- 

 gies, pining for an outlet, acted as a drag on man's own 

 potentialities, and thus retarded to an untold extent the 

 world's advancement. In times past, as has aptly been 

 said, "an enormous part of the brain power of mankind 

 has been spent or wasted in smiting the Philistines hip and 

 thigh, and an enormous part of the brain power of woman- 

 kind has been spent in cajoling Sampson. " 



It will mean that the women of the future will be more 

 suitable companions for the rapidly increasing number of 

 highly educated men of science; that having their intel- 

 lects developed pari passu with those of men, they will be 

 able to sympathize with the noblest aims of their husbands 

 and assist them in their most important undertakings, as 

 did the wives of Huber, Lavoisier, Pasteur, Huxley, Louis 

 Agassiz and others scarcely less renowned in the annals 

 of science. It will mean that they will not only share 

 in the joys and the sorrows of their life-companions, but 

 that they will also have a part in their thoughts, their 

 studies, their labors, their achievements. For one should 

 bear in mind that the first essential to a perfect union of 

 hearts is a perfect harmony of minds. Where neither hus- 

 band nor wife is educated, the virtues may suffice for com- 

 panionship, but where the man is educated and the woman 

 ignorant, there are sooner or later estrangements and the 

 wife becomes little better than an old Japanese conception 

 of her, ' ' a cook without pay, " or a pasha 's toy for an idle 

 hour. Chrysalde in Moliere's L'ficole des Femmes, de- 

 clares : 



"Qu'il est assez ennuyeux, que je crois, 

 D'avoir toute sa vie une bete avec soi." 



A briefer and truer statement of the evils of unequal in- 

 tellectual mating was never penned. 1 Men of intelligence 

 i Dr. Johnson expressed the same sentiment when he declared that 

 a man of sense should meet a suitable companion in a wife. "It 



