840 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



At present, thinkers seem to acknowledge 

 that animals can and do reason ; and scien- 

 tific men cease giving instinct as a cause for 

 the conduct of animals. Will these think- 

 ers now put women on a lower level than 

 animals, or do they limit the word " reason- 

 ing " to slow action of the mind, and refuse 

 it as a term for quick mental action ? That 

 were strange ! 



As a woman, I have seen much of women. 

 I have yet to find one with real powers "of 

 intuition. I will not call her impossible. 

 Instead, I encounter foolish women, who act 

 from prejudice or impatience ; wise women, 

 who base their actions on great quantities of 

 observations continually renewed and com- 



pared, as constant and careful as those of 

 an accomplished detective ; and a variety of 

 women between these types. But so ab- 

 surd is the human being under the sway of 

 conventionality some of the wise actually 

 made themselves believe that they acted and 

 judged by intuition, because they had been 

 told that women did so. 



Furthermore, kindness may not require 

 much reasoning power in the kind person, 

 nor may mere abstention from vice in the 

 abstainer; but I have always found that 

 active goodness and what other sort de- 

 serves the name of good? needed reason 

 to be brought into play as much as feeling. 

 ELIZABETH WINTHROP JOHNSON. 



EDITOR'S TABLE. 



AN THEE RAID ON THE DOCTRINE OF 

 EVOLUTION. 



A FEW months ago we referred to 

 the objections which had been 

 made to the teaching of modern scien- 

 tific views in the University of Califor- 

 nia ; but fortunately we were able to 

 state that much public sympathy had 

 been extended to the incriminated pro- 

 fessors, and that they were able to hold 

 their positions without any curtailment 

 of the liberty they claimed of imparting 

 the best scientific instruction in their 

 power without regard to preconceived 

 notions or theories. Even as we wrote 

 there was similar trouble brewing, 

 though we were not aware of it, in the 

 University of Texas. The results in the 

 latter case, if we are rightly informed, 

 have been far less satisfactory than in 

 the former. The Texan conscience, it 

 seems, is a very tender one ; and when 

 it became mooted that Dr. Edwards, 

 the Adjunct Professor of Biology, was 

 teaching on evolutionary lines, and that 

 the ingenuous youths who attended his 

 classes were in danger of imbibing such 

 ideas as that the world may not really 

 have been made in six days, and that 

 the countless species of plant and animal 

 life now existing or that have existed in 

 the past may not have been called sepa- 



rately into being by so many distinct 

 acts of creation, there was much heart- 

 searching on the ranches, and an en- 

 lightened public opinion determined that 

 something must be done at once. They 

 can stand a good many things down in 

 the Lone Star State, but heterodoxy and 

 horse- stealing are two things they will 

 not stand if they can help it. As the 

 Austin Daily Statesman elegantly ex- 

 pressed it : " The mind of the common 

 people of Texas is wonderfully set and 

 united on the verity of the old Bible as 

 she stands in the King James version. 

 The least hint that anything is being 

 taught in any school that will unsettle 

 the faith of their children in the good 

 old Bible doctrine of the creation of 

 matter, the origin of life, and the de- 

 scent of the race from Adam and Eve, 

 without going any further back in the 

 pedigree, will raise the ' Old Henry ' 

 and wake the reptile that sleeps on the 

 log in the sun with pious fathers and 

 mothers all over the State. The origin 

 of man, as set forth in the Bible in a 

 pretty clear fashion, is made in the im- 

 age of God with a natural body and a 

 reasonable soul. It was a creative act 

 of almighty power immediately per- 

 formed with no intermediate ancestry." 

 The slight literary defects which the 



