At lectures the young women are models of attention and application; perhaps they even make too great effort to carry home in black and white what they have heard.  They generally sit in the front seats, because they register early, and, moreover, because they come early, long before the lecture begins.  But it is noticeable that they give only a superficial glance at the preparations which the professor passes around.  Sometimes they pass them to their neighbor without even looking at them; a longer examination would prevent their taking notes.

On examination the conduct of the young women is the same as during the lectures.  They know better than the young men.  To employ a classroom expression, they are enormously crammed.  Their memory is good, so that they know perfectly how to give the answer to the question which is put.  But generally they stop there.  An indirect question makes them lose the thread.  As soon as the examiner appeals to individual reason, the examination is over; they do not answer.  The examiner seeks to make the sense of the question clearer, and uses a word, perhaps, which is in the manuscript of the student, when, pop! the thing goes as if you had pressed the button of a telephone.  If the examination consisted solely in written or oral replies to questions on subjects which have been treated in the lectures or which could be read up on in the manuals, the ladies would always secure brilliant results.  But, alas! there are other practical tests in which the candidate finds herself face to face with reality, and that she cannot meet successfully unless she has done practical work in the laboratories, and it is there the shoe pinches.

The respect in which laboratory work is particularly difficult to women—­one would hardly believe it—­is that they are often very awkward and clumsy with their hands.  The assistants in the laboratories are unanimous in their complaint; they are pursued with questions about the most trifling things, and one woman gives them more trouble than three men.  One would think the delicate fingers of these young women adapted especially to microscopic work, to the manipulation of small slides, to cutting thin sections, to making the most delicate preparations; the truth is quite the contrary.  You can tell the table of a woman at a glance:  from the fragments of glass, broken instruments, the broken scalpels, the spoiled preparations.  There are doubtless exceptions, but they are exceptions.[279]

Zuerich was among the first of the European universities opening their doors to women, and it is particularly interesting to see their first efforts in connection with the higher learning.  Without a wide experience of life, and without practice in constructive thinking, they naturally fell back on the memory to retain a hold on results in a field with which they were not sufficiently trained to operate in it independently.  It is frequently alleged, and is implied in Professor