Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/778

758 It would be alarming, if we could believe with. Mr. Allen in anything so unflattering to masculine endeavor; but, unfortunately, there are no statistics to prove whether this is due to dulled feminine instinct, or to the failure of man to make love at the right time. In the interim, from collateral evidence, the latter cause appears more trustworthy.

IV. If freedom from Mrs. Grundy is desirable, it is patent that education and independence are gradually liberating woman. The counter-charge is often made that the educated woman is too regardless of that favored deity.

From a biological point of view, Mr. Allen endows four years of college training with enormous potentiality. In this he evidently follows the eminent leader, Mr. Herbert Spencer, who asserts that the infertility of "upper-class girls" in England is due to "overtaxing of their brains"! Whether the majority of English "upper-class girls" are educated to that extreme point, and whether the question is not begged in the use of the word "overtaxation," may be left to the reader. It is strange that powerful heredity and palpable causes of race deterioration should be ignored by physiologists in order to throw the onus of this accusation upon mental culture. Insurance tables are made out more scientifically than this forecast of a girl's future. If in education, or in the industrial independence of women, there existed any tendency toward infertility, it would be barely discoverable in our generation, little more so in the next, and possibly in the third generation something might be ascertained from careful statistics following Mr. Galton's method. Nature does not retrograde so rapidly. There is nothing to warrant the assumption that four years of altered food, training, or environment, not interfering with good physical condition, could obliterate an instinct or function. Investigation corroborates this. Even in England, we learn that infertility and higher education are not synonymous terms. A teacher of wide experience states: "I know several families of children whose mothers were among the pioneers of the movement now so savagely attacked. ... Among my friends, not a few sturdy, handsome children, whose mothers underwent severe study in their earlier days. One of these was a lady who, with one other, was the first woman to take the classical tripos, and whose degree was not beaten, I think, for ten years." In America, in "a report given of the family conditions of one hundred and thirty alumnæ who have