graduation. Women find not the slightest difficulty in turning out doctor's dissertations as good as or better than the average. Scholarly work is usually produced by instructors or fellows or docents connected with a university or college under the spur of competition for professorships, and of a struggle for a livelihood. The probability of its being produced is infinitely increased by association and companionship with other investigators. Women are practically excluded from the chance of professorships except in a few women's colleges, so that the spur of competition is largely lacking; they are to a great extent supported, or might be if they wished, by their parents or by a husband, so that the struggle for a livelihood is also lacking; and because there are as yet so few women engaged in research and conventions do not admit of unrestrained association between men and women, women are cut off almost wholly from the companionship with other scholars which is the most important factor of all in original production. So far as I know we have preserved in letters and journals records of the inner lives of only three women of genius, Mary Somerville, Sonia Kovalevsky, the great mathematicians, and Marie Bashkirtseff, the young and original artist, and the picture they give of loneliness and lack of scholarly and artistic companionship with their fellows is appalling. There are only two professions, acting and singing, where women have this unrestrained artistic association, and in these there is no apparent difference in salary or fame between the supreme successes of men and women, the balance if anything turning in favor of women. Then too a very serious drawback is the inherited tradition - which I am not criticising except in so far as it interferes with her original production — that a woman is the sick nurse and unpaid companion of her family, and that in her holidays, if she is a breadwinner, and in the long summer vacation when men are doing the work that will make them known as scholars; or if she lives at home, day in and day out she must give of her vitality and life. to the older generation. The woman professor or woman doctor often does the work of two women, the old-fashioned woman and the new rolled into one, and I defy a Kepler, a Newton, an Edison, a Sir William Thomson, or a Pasteur, to make great discoveries under such circumstances. All his domestic life is arranged for

the convenience of a man of genius, but a woman of genius must give way on every point in her home life. Only in two professions, again singing and acting, are the money prizes of success so great that the husbands and fathers and mothers of such women play the rôle of women in the family of a great man. There are various other details of a woman's life, trivial in themselves but very important in the mass, such as the greater relative expense, inconvenience, and unhealthfulness of a woman's dress as compared to a man's; the much greater time required to procure and keep in order a woman's wardrobe when it is procured; the calls and social duties expected of a woman, if she is to have any social life whatever, by other women, and performed for a man by the women of his family; the impossibility for conventional reasons of a poor woman (and all scholars and investigators are poor at first, and often at last) living anything like so cheaply as a poor man, or travelling as cheaply.

Original investigation and research, in that it is one of the greatest manifestations of human faculty, requires all our powers at their best; it is as it were the product of the surplus energy and vitality of the whole human being; and every tiniest circumstance that lessens this abundant overflow of power greatly affects the quality of the original product, and indeed the probability of its being produced at all. I think I have sufficiently shown the reasons peculiar to their sex that tend at present to limit the original and independent output of women in science and letters; but I have left to the last the most important consideration of all. Women scholars who feel within themselves the wonderful gifts of originality and power and who desire above all other things to give these gifts free play, must as a rule deny themselves the companionship of married life, because unless the men whom they wish to marry have abundant fortunes, which is most improbable, as scholarly women are not attracted by bankers or captains of industry and the reverse is also true they must occupy themselves with household cares of the most unintelligent and mechanical kind, which would kill in any man, and does kill in most women, the desire and the power for original work. Very few men would make, and very few women do make, this sacrifice of personal happiness, for there comes a time in most men's and

women's lives when they desire above all things to marry some one individual man or woman. The choice to remain unmarried is more difficult for a woman and perhaps for this reason so seldom made because, without prolonged trial throughout a long life, no one can be sure just how much he or she can add to human knowledge. I am sure that I need not add that in my opinion this lack of scholarly companionship and this sacrifice of marriage on the part of women scholars, and all these circumstances that I have enumerated of a woman's life that militate against the highest success in scholarship, are not to be regarded as a permanent handicap. Collegebred women are now working seriously on the problem of household economy, and it seems to me that we shall richly deserve our fate if we cannot solve it; but until it is solved domestic difficulties will limit the power of women in every direction.

I have devoted the greater part of my argument to describing the peculiar circumstances of women's lives that tend to prevent the production of original scholarly work, and the same circumstances limit in the same way the production of literary and artistic work by women. My remaining task is easy. As a woman. of supreme creative genius I will name Sappho, the fragments of whose poems show her to be unsurpassed, and probably never to be surpassed, in lyric splendor. The chances were immensely against the development of a woman poet in classic times, and that this woman poet should be the greatest lyric poet of the world was beyond all the laws of probability. In England - for I will confine myself to England, as the force of the argument is as great if I name a few women of genius as many a woman, Charlotte Brontë, has created the most imaginative concrete and impassioned examples of English fiction, the great novel of her sister, Emily Brontë, ranking second only to hers; a woman, Jane Austen, has written, many people think and I agree with them, the most artistically perfect novels written in English; a woman, George Eliot, is regarded by many people as second only to Thackeray among English novelists of the last half of the Nineteenth Century, and her influence over the thought of her generation was undoubtedly much greater than his; and innumerable other excellent women novelists of the second rank might be men

tioned. Indeed so out of proportion to men are women novelists in number and in those qualities that bring financial success in America and England, that it looks as if novel writing, like teaching, nursing, stenography, and library work, were destined to become the profession of women. And in poetry, although with the exception of Sappho there have as yet been no women poets of supreme genius, there have been many like Mrs. Browning and Christina Rossetti who must be regarded as standing relatively high in the second rank and were unquestionably endowed with poetic genius. Acting and singing I have already spoken of. There are on the whole at the present time more great actors and singers, commanding higher salaries, among women than among men. Women artists are producing more and better works every year, and there has been in France one woman, Rosa Bonheur, of the highest rank in her own generation, and in America to-day Miss Cecilia Beaux and Miss Mary Cassatt rank second only to Mr. Whistler and Mr. Sargent.

Yet as twenty-five years ago women were denied the capacity, inclination, and health to succeed in university studies, because they had not as yet had the opportunity to prove that they possessed all these qualifications in superabundant measure; so a little more than a century ago women would have been denied the power to write great novels, and poems, paint great pictures, and act and sing great rôles; and so in like manner, because the circumstances of women's lives have been in the past, and still continue to be, unfavorable in the highest degree to scholarly investigation and research, most people do not hesitate to deny to women as a sex this last, and in many aspects highest, endowment of human faculty. But the time of actual demonstration is close at hand. Women scholars and investigators, of whom Madame Kovalevsky is as yet the greatest, are already producing in sufficient numbers to warrant us in believing that we shall have many women scholars and inventors of eminence before the century closes. The future of women in independent study and research seems to me sure.

ORIGINAL RESEARCH.

What shall I say? You do not want me to tell you what original research is. You do not want me to tell you what its value is or to give you a history of original research. Any one of these points might be elaborated to almost any extent.

The word, or rather the expression, original research, has been, it seems to me, somewhat abused and played with within the last dozen years or more. It is a charm to conjure with also, and I fear that there are people — not in this audience — who sometimes use the expression without having a very clear idea in regard to its meaning. I have heard conversations in which the expression is used in a flippant way, and as though it carried with it its own definition. Yet it is not so easy to define what original research is. To be sure, we can give a dictionary definition, which, of course, leaves us in a helpless condition. Whether we can get to realize what it means is another question. I do not believe that any one can get a full realization of what original research is—what it means without engaging in it and seeing something of its workings. And then it is only by slow processes that one comes to realize what that expression carries with it.

It is easy enough to say that original research is work undertaken for the purpose of finding out something that is unknown. That is true enough, but there are a good many efforts of that kind that hardly come under the head of original research. People are all the time undertaking work to find out something that is not known, but this is often not worth finding out. Nothing is added to the stock of knowledge that is of any value whatever; and any work of that kind can be eliminated from the field of research. It is any kind of work that adds to the sum total of human knowledge of the past, present, or future. It is a broad term, but after all, when one has been engaged in that kind of work for many years, he begins to realize that it means something and means something very important. Now, the mere stating of a definition, therefore-and that is true not only of this case but of most other cases - the mere stating of the definition does not give us what we want — does not give an explanation of the significance of the expression.