tion; and, as the daughter of a great mathematician, it is not
likely that I should underrate mathematics as a mental discipline. I am
only urging that they should be subordinated to higher and more
practical issues.

I am thankfully aware that these remarks do not apply to American women
to the same degree in which they apply to our English girls. The paucity
of domestic servants, and the consequent pressure of necessity, have
saved you from the fine lady ideal which we have adopted for our girls
and the exclusively book education into which we have almost
unconsciously drifted. You have been constrained to choose some nobler
type on which to mould your scheme of female education than that of the
tadpole, which is all head, no hands, a much active and frivolous tail.
Your girls are brought up not to consider it beneath them to take part
in the work of the house; and something of the all round capability of
American women which so strikes us is doubtless owing to their not
having incurred "this Nemesis of disproportion," and therefore to their
combining intellectual culture with practical efficiency.

Why we should have taken this fine lady ideal for our girls, when we
take such a much more practical standard for our boys, has always
puzzled me. If an excellent opening offered itself to one of our sons at
a bank, we should agree with his father in expecting him to take it,
though it would involve the drudgery of sitting in a cramped attitude on
a tall stool for hours and hours every day. Why should we accept life's
necessary drudgery for our boys and refuse it for our girls? No life
worth living can be had without drudgery,--the most brilliant as well as
the dullest. Darwin spent eight of the best years of his life in an
exhaustive investigation into the organization of a barnacle--labor
accompanied, as all intellectual work was with him, by a constant sense
of physical nausea from which he suffered, till, from sheer weariness
and disgust at the drudgery, he ends his researches in his emphatic way
with the exclamation, "D---- the barnacles!" At least a woman's
household drudgery does not end in a barnacle, or in dead coin, but in a
living and loved personality whose comfort and health it secures.
Blessed is drudgery, the homely mother of Patience, "that young and
rose-lipped cherubim," of quiet endurance, of persistency in well-doing,
of all the stablest elements of character.

Do not let us refuse to our girls the di