Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/409

Rh not, as is probable, to advance with a speed relatively accelerated by the momentum of its already acquired velocity), it must take many centuries for heredity to produce the missing five ounces of the female brain.

In conclusion, a few words may be added on the question of female education as this actually stands at the present time. Among all the features of progress which will cause the present century to be regarded by posterity as beyond comparison the most remarkable epoch in the history of our race, I believe that inauguration of the so-called woman's movement in our own generation, will be considered one of the most important. For I am persuaded that this movement is destined to grow; that with its growth the highest attributes of one half of the human race are destined to be widely influenced; that this influence will profoundly react upon the other half, not alone in the nursery and the drawing-room, but also in the study, the academy, the forum, and the senate; that this latest yet inevitable wave of mental evolution can not be stayed until it has changed the whole aspect of civilization. In an essay already alluded to, Sydney Smith has remarked, though not quite correctly, that up to his time there had been no woman who had produced a single notable work, either of reason or imagination, whether in English, French, German, or Italian literature. A few weeks ago Mrs. Fawcett was able to show us that since then there have been at least forty women who have left a permanent mark in English literature alone. Now this fact becomes one of great significance when we remember that it is the result of but the earliest phase of the woman's movement. For, as already indicated, this movement is now plainly of the nature of a ferment. When I was at Cambridge, the then newly-established foundations of Girton and Newnham were to nearly all of us matters of amusement. But we have lived to alter our views; for we have lived to see that that was but the beginning of a great social change, which has since spread, and is still spreading, at so extraordinary a rate that we are now within measurable distance of the time when no English lady will be found to have escaped its influence. It is not merely that women's colleges are springing up like mushrooms in all quarters of the kingdom, or that the old type of young ladies' governess is being rapidly starved out of existence. It is of much more importance even than this that the immense reform in girls' education, which has been so recently introduced by the Day-Schools Company working in conjunction with the University Board and local examinations, has already shaken to its base the whole system, and even the whole ideal, of female education, so that there is scarcely a private school in the country which has not been more or less affected by the change. In a word, whether we like it or not, the woman's movement is upon us; and what we have now to do is to guide the flood into what