en 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 intel