Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/427

Rh myths and propitiatory rites; and there is a singular similarity in these myths. The psychic identity of the Americans is well illustrated in their languages, which are strikingly alike in their logical substructure. The precise number of linguistic stocks in use in America at the discovery has not been made out. The Bureau of Ethnology has defined fifty-nine north of Mexico, forty of which were confined to the narrow strip between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific. The stocks, including the South American, are divided by Dr. Brinton into five groups—the North Atlantic, the North Pacific, the Central, the South Pacific, and the South Atlantic; and each stock is considered separately.

voluminous record deals with a subject which within the past generation has risen to great interest and importance to both sexes. The volume comprises an editor's preface, an introduction of two pages by Julia Ward Howe, and seventeen chapters, by as many writers (all women), three of them being on the education of women in different sections of the country, while the others deal with different fields of activity into which women have made their way, generally against obstacles. Of the latter fourteen chapters, seven treat of special divisions of woman's work in philanthropy, and the subjects of the other seven are woman in literature, in journalism, in medicine, in the ministry, in law, in the state, and in industry. The editor explains, in answer to the question, which has been asked her, why she has no chapter on woman in marriage, that the book is restricted to fields "in which women, if entrance were not absolutely denied them, were at least not welcomed nor valued." The editor had a perfect right to limit the book as she saw fit, but thus limited it does not fulfill the promise of its title. An exact title would be, The Extension of Woman's Work in America; the present one is a weapon for those who charge inexactness as a characteristic fault of women. The occupations that are omitted, including the one above mentioned, domestic service, teaching, and dressmaking represent the greater part of the work that women do, and others are such as the sex has won some of its proudest laurels in, namely, the fine arts and the stage. Although this record seems to have been limited by a purpose of celebrating triumphs over public opinion, it contains much information, and recounts many noble works. The profession in which woman has won the highest success in spite of the most determined opposition, and hence has the greatest victory to celebrate, is that of medicine. The chapter on this subject is by Mary Putnam Jacobi, M. D. It traces the history of the movement with considerable detail, giving many names and dates, but without permitting the statistical to overshadow the literary features of the essay. The most important division of the volume is the group of occupations included under the general head Woman in Industry. The essay with this title is by Alice H. Rhine; it describes the transfer of spinning, weaving, and knitting from the home to the factory, the change in the labor of seamstresses which the sewing machine introduced, the establishment of exchanges for goods made by women, the participation of women in trades-unions, various State investigations of the work of women, and some of the legislation based on the information thus gathered. It also gives an account of the rise of woman's education in industrial art, the establishment of various organizations to furnish working-women with comfortable living, to protect them from being cheated out of their wages or savings, and to teach them various gainful occupations, and closes with glowing praise of the Knights of Labor and the principles of socialism. Little or nothing is said about saleswomen, or women as stenographers, typewriters, telegraphers, cashiers, book-keepers, Government clerks, canvassers, and teachers of cookery. Miss Rhine calls the sewing-machine a curse, "like all other labor-saving machines—"a delusion which is mostly confined to the uneducated. One quality for which this essay deserves praise is its freedom from useless words. The paper on Woman in Literature, by Helen G. Cone, records much of glorious achievement. It is rather apologetic, assigning lack of advantages and opportunities as the reason why still more women have not succeeded in this