Women and Science

Romanes, in an essay on the mental differences between men and women, assured his readers that under the most favorable conditions for culture, and supposing the mind of man to remain stationary, it would take woman many centuries to produce "the missing five ounces of female brain." If the famous English naturalist had lived to be present this afternoon in Sanders Theatre, where Madame Curie will be honored as the co-discoverer of radium, he would come away with his belief in the inferiority of the feminine intellect dissipated into thin air. Especially would he be delivered of the notion, long held and acquiesced in, that while in some practical fields of mental effort women may be successful, they have no capacity for science. And he would note, also with a sense of awakening, that within the past few days Harvard herself has been honored by the degree in mathematics and astronomy conferred on her distinguished astronomer, "Miss Annie J. Cannon, by the University of Groningen. How much "gray matter" could have been missing from the brain of the woman who discovered three new luminaries in the sky, added 150 "variables" to the celestial map, and catalogued the spectra of 220,000 stars in all parts of the heavens? --Boston Herald.