ortions of the
sphere above us, and we see how little we affect it. We forget the part
of the sphere around and before us--it extends just as far every way.

"Another common saying, 'It isn't the way,' etc. Who settles the way? Is
there any one so forgetful of the sovereignty bestowed on her by God
that she accepts a leader--one who shall capture her mind?

"There is this great danger in student life. Now, we rest all upon what
Socrates said, or what Copernicus taught; how can we dispute authority
which has come down to us, all established, for ages?

"We must at least question it; we cannot accept anything as granted,
beyond the first mathematical formulae. Question everything else.

"'The world is round, and like a ball
Seems swinging in the air.'[1]
[Footnote 1: From Peter Parley's Primary Geography.]

"No such thing! the world is not round, it does not swing, and it
doesn't _seem_ to swing!

"I know I shall be called heterodox, and that unseen lightning flashes
and unheard thunderbolts will be playing around my head, when I say that
women will never be profound students in any other department except
music while they give four hours a day to the _practice_ of music. I
should by all means encourage every woman who is born with musical gifts
to study music; but study it as a science and an art, and not as an
accomplishment; and to every woman who is not musical, I should say,
'Don't study it at all;' you cannot afford four hours a day, out of some
years of your life, just to be agreeable in company upon _possible_
occasions.

"If for four hours a day you studied, year after year, the science of
language, for instance, do you suppose you would not be a linguist? Do
you put the mere pleasing of some social party, and the reception of a
few compliments, against the mental development of four hours a day of
study of something for which you were born?

"When I see that girls who are required by their parents to go through
with the irksome practising really become respectable performers, I
wonder what four hours a day at something which they loved, and for
which God designed them, would do for them.

"I should think that to a real scientist in music there would be
something mortifying in this rush of all women into music; as there
would be to me if I saw every girl learning the constellations, and then
thinking she was an astronomer!

"Jan. 8, 1876. At the meeting of graduates at the Deacon House, the
spe