FUTURE OF WOMEN IN SCIENCE 415 



are no longer, like Rousseau, satisfied with an ignorant do- 

 mestic for a wife, and still less are they disposed with 



was a miserable thing," he asserted in characteristic fashion, "when 

 the conversation could only be such as whether the mutton should 

 be boiled or roasted, and a probable dispute about that." 



Sidney Smith, in a forceful and trenchant essay On the Education 

 of Women, written for the Edinburgh Review a century ago, gives it 

 as his deliberate opinion that * ' The instruction of women improves 

 the stock of natural talents, and employs more minds for the in- 

 struction and amusement of the world; it increases the pleasures of 

 Bociety by multiplying the topics upon which the two sexes take a 

 common interest; and makes marriage an intercourse of understand- 

 ing as well as of affection by giving dignity and importance to the 

 female character. The education of women favors public morals; it 

 provides for every season of life as well as for the brightest and 

 the best; and leaves a woman when she is stricken by the hand of 

 time, not as she now is, destitute of everything and neglected by all, 

 but with the full power and the splendid attractions of knowledge, 

 diffusing the elegant pleasures of polite literature, and receiving the 

 just homage of learned and accomplished men." 



As to the oft repeated commonplace of noodledom that higher 

 education puts an end to domestic economy and deteriorates the 

 noblest qualities of womanhood, the same clear-headed writer asks: 

 "Can anything ... be more perfectly absurd than to suppose 

 that the care and perpetual solicitude which a mother feels for her 

 children, depends upon her ignorance of Greek or mathematics; and 

 that she would desert an infant for a quadratic equation that Cim- 

 merian ignorance can aid parental affection, or the circle of the arts 

 and sciences produce its destruction that the moment you suffer 

 women to eat of the tree of knowledge the rest of the family will 

 very soon be reduced to the same kind of aerial and unsatisfactory 

 diet!" 



Still more insistent on the necessity of the broadest and deepest 

 education for woman education in science as well as in art and lit- 

 erature is the Most Eev. Archbishop, J. L. Spalding, who by his 

 writing and lectures has done so much for the cause of the higher 

 education of both men and women. In an eloquent and pregnant dis- 

 course, pronounced in the Church of the Gesu in Rome, in March, 

 1900, he told his vast audience composed of the elite of the Eternal 

 City that: 



"If we are to have a race of enlightened, noble, and brave men, 

 we must give to woman the best education it is possible for her to 



