Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/218

206 is an adaptation of the one already proposed to account for her smaller physical strength. It is gravely asserted that mental activity in art or science has been systematically repressed among women, and that in consequence their cerebral development has been injuriously interfered with. To this contention it would be a sufficient reply were we to simply point to the fact already mentioned, that the relative inferiority in the size of the brain of women, instead of diminishing as their social status has improved, has, on the contrary, been increasing. We may hence fairly argue that it exists not in virtue of any artificial interference, but of a law of Nature. We can, however, adduce other considerations. In the pursuit of the fine arts, woman, instead of being checked and hindered, whether by law or by social conventions, has been encouraged. An acquaintance with music has been literally forced upon every girl of the upper and middle classes. Yet, leaving composers out of the question, how many of the million female performers on the piano-forte, now to be found in Europe and America, can take rank with Liszt and Thalberg? In the highest development of literature, poetry, sex has been no obstacle to the recognition of merit. Yet neither Sappho in the past nor Mrs. Hemans and Mrs. Browning in our own day can be placed even in the same class with the leading poets of Greece, England, and Germany.

Women have certainly till of late met with few direct facilities for the pursuit of science. But, in England at least, neither have men. Our great scientific discoverers, until quite recent days, have been substantially self-taught, and even if in their youth they enjoyed a university education their subsequent researches, though post hoc (after this), have assuredly not been propter hoc (on account of this). Scientific books and apparatus have been as accessible to one sex as to the other; and these have generally been the only opportunities that our discoverers have had at their command. How to use such appliances they had to discover for themselves. We deny, therefore, that the exclusion of young women from universities, in which modern sciences were not taught, can have hindered them from entering upon a scientific career. Equally do we deny that public opinion forbade for them study and research. Had Miss Herschel been a man, her astronomical discoveries could not have been more highly or more deservedly appreciated. Not a dog barked at her for preferring determining the orbits of comets to ordinary feminine avocations. In like manner, if any woman had possessed the necessary faculties and turn of mind, there was nothing in the way of public prejudices or established customs to prevent her from having anticipated Dalton in discovering the laws of definite chemical combination. Nor, if thus discovered, would the "atomic theory" have met with a less favorable reception. We then entirely deny the existence of any supposed conspiracy to repress scientific talent in the female sex, and we hold that the three arguments adduced to explain its comparative rarity among women are utterly inconclusive.