WOMAN AND SCIENCE. 
361 
side by side those creatures which devour one another. They draw close 
together, each faces its antagonist, and you conclude that a frightful duel is 
imminent. But she has generally concealed the tragic struggle. She has 
shrunk from painting death. 
How much more terrible would have been her task had she advanced 
further, had she opened and dissected her models, and forced her feminine 
pencil to the lugubrious painting of anatomical detail ! 
And here we recognize the precise limit at which women are arrested in 
the study of the natural sciences. They are incapable of confronting it on 
both sides. Michael Angelo has finely said :—“ Death and life are but one. 
They are the work of the same master and the same hand.” But women do 
not submit. Between them and death no compact is possible. This is very 
easily understood; they themselves are, life in all its prolific charm. They are 
born to give it. Whatever breaks the charm is a horror to them. Death, and 
especially pain, are not only antipathic, but almost incomprehensible. They 
feel that only happiness and joy should attend upon woman. Pain inflicted 
by a woman’s hand appears to them very j ustly as a horrible contradiction. 
In the natural sciences there are three things they may master, the three 
things of life : the. incubation of the new being,—that is, the tenderness of its 
earliest care; the education , the nourishment (to speak as our fathers did) of 
tl*e young adults ; finally, the observation of manners, and the subtle intelli¬ 
gence of means of inter-communication with all species. By the aid of these 
three woman’s arts, man may conciliate and gradually appropriate the inferior 
species, and even many of the insect species. To them belong entirely the 
arts of domestication. If childhood were less cruel, or at least not harshly 
insensible, it might share these womanly cares. For Woman, as a soft and 
tender child, full of pity, is the mediator of all nature. 
But as for death, as for pain, as for the lights which science draws from 
them, do not speak of them to Woman. Here she halts, leaves you on the 
road, and will go no further forward. 
She asserts—and the assertion may appear of some real weight, even to 
the sedatest minds—that science, of late years, has marched by two contrary 
roads : on the one hand, demonstrating by the study of manners and of organs 
that animals are not a world apart, but far more like ourselves than had been 
generally supposed ; and on the other, when it has so clearly proved their great 
resemblance, and consequently their capacity of suffering, it ordains that we 
shall inflict upon them the most exquisite and most cruelly protracted agonies. 
Science, on this terrible side, closes itself more and more against women. 
Nature, while inviting them to penetrate it, checks them at the same time 
by their excessive tenderness of feeling, and by the reverence for life with 
which she herself has inspired them. 
