Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/263

Rh French, and German, they will never attain to these qualifications for studying the character of children. The seminaries do not prepare them for it; the high-schools and the normal schools do not confer it. Nor is this all, nor the worst. There is no appreciation of it or aspiration for it. The so-called woman's movement, which professes to aim at her higher improvement and the enlargement of her activities, is not in this direction. It looks to public, professional, and political life, as woman's future and better sphere of action. In the new colleges for women that are springing up in all directions with munificent endowments, the supreme consideration seems to be to ignore sex, and frame the feminine curriculum of study on the old masculine models, and keep it up to the masculine standards. The spirit of these schools is that of a slavish imitation. They are organized with no reference to the urgent and living needs of society, but they go in for the traditional trumperies of the old colleges; and, instead of studying science in its personal, domestic, and social bearings, the women demand Latin and Greek, and as much of it as the masculine intellect has proved capable of surviving. Children are imitators. Savages are imitators. What else are the women in their demands for new and ampler opportunities of culture? They will study classics, and let the men study the babies; but, if they are incompetent, of course the men must do it. For this business of studying the science of infancy must be pursued by somebody, thoroughly and exhaustively. It is nothing less than a transcendent problem of human character lying at the foundation of the social state; fur only as the human being is understood in its deeper organic laws, prenatal and infantine, as well as in its subsequent unfolding, can we arrive at settled and scientific views regarding the rights, claims, duties, and true interests of the individual in society. If not a new research, it is at least a new impulse and stage of research, and we say again that we should think intelligent and ambitious women would be glad to have a share in it, and would have wisdom enough to include it in their extended schemes of female education.

not long ago called attention to a newspaper article under the title of "German Darwinism," which made a point against Herbert Spencer as not being recognized in Germany. We pointed out various reasons in the national habits of thought, why Spencer's doctrines, which are put forth under the form of a philosophical system, would be likely not to attract the attention of German thinkers so early as those of other Continental countries. Our view has since been strikingly confirmed by an eminent German authority, Prof. Wundt, of the University of Leipsic, a physiologist and psychologist of worldwide reputation. In a review of the German translation of "First Principles," published in the Jena Literary Gazette, Prof. Wundt gives an excellent account of the book, from which the following statements are condensed:

"Among the dominant ideas in this