set of women.  It was about 8 o’clock in the morning, when some people began to shout:  “Here come the rich Americans!  Now we will sell things!” We saw a large party of travelers coming through the crowd.  They looked very queer.  Their clothes seemed queer, as they were so different from ours.  They wore leather boots instead of wooden shoes, and they all looked weak and pale.  The women were tall and thin, like beanpoles, and their shoulders were stooped and narrow; most of them wore glasses or spectacles, showing that their eyes were weak.  The corners of their mouths were all pulled down, and their faces were crossed and crisscrossed with lines and wrinkles, as though they were carrying all the care of the world.  Our women all began to laugh and dance and shout at the strangers....  The sight of these people gave me my first idea of America.  I heard that the women there never worked, laced themselves too tightly, and were always ill.[278]

The French dressmaker who wrote this passage has the true idea of education and of mind.  The mind is an organ for controlling the environment, and it is a safe general principle that the mind which shows high power in the manipulation of a simple situation will show the same quality of efficiency in a more complex one.

The savage, the peasant, the poor man, and woman are not what we call intellectual, because they are not taught to know and manipulate the materials of knowledge.  The savage is outside the process from geographical reasons; the peasant is not in the center of interest; the poor man’s needs are pressing, and do not permit of interests of a mediate character; and woman does not participate because it is neither necessary nor womanly.

Even the most serious women of the present day stand, in any work they undertake, in precisely the same relation to men that the amateur stands to the professional in games.  They may be desperately interested and may work to the limit of endurance at times; but, like the amateur, they got into the game late, and have not had a life-time of practice, or they do not have the advantage of that pace gained only by competing incessantly with players of the very first rank.  No one will contend that the amateur in billiards has a nervous organization less fitted to the game than the professional; it is admitted that the difference lies in the constant practice of the professional, the more exacting standards prevailing in the professional ranks, and constant play in “fast company.”  A group of women would make a sorry spectacle in competition with a set of men who made billiards their life-work.  But how sad a spectacle the eminent philosophers of the world would make in the same competition!

Scientific pursuits and the allied intellectual occupations are a game which women have entered late, and their lack of practice is frequently mistaken for lack of natural ability.  Writing some years ago of the women in his classes at the University of Zuerich, Professor Carl Vogt said: