to come and learn,--and only withhold assistance from the weaker minds of
women? A little schoolgirl once told me that she did not object to her
teacher's showing partiality, but thought she "ought to show partiality to
all alike." If all our university systems are wrong, and the proper diet
for mathematical genius consists of fifty years' snubbing, let us employ
it, by all means; but let it be applied to both sexes.

That it is the duty of women, even under disadvantageous circumstances, to
prove their purpose by labor, to "verify their credentials," is true
enough; but this moral is only part of the moral of Mrs. Somerville's book,
and is cruelly incomplete without the other half. What a garden of roses
was Mrs. Somerville's life, according to some comfortable critics! "All
that for which too many women nowadays are content to sit and whine, or
fitfully and carelessly struggle, came naturally and quietly to Mrs.
Somerville. And the reason was that she never asked for anything until she
had earned it; or, rather, she never asked at all, but was content to
earn." Naturally and quietly! You might as well say that Garrison fought
slavery "quietly," or that Frederick Douglass's escape came to him
"naturally." Turn to the book itself, and see with what strong, though
never actually bitter, feeling, the author looks back upon her hard
struggle.

"I was intensely ambitious to excel in something; for I felt in my
own breast that women were capable of taking a higher place in
creation than that assigned them in my early days, which was very
low" (p. 60). "Nor ... should I have had courage to ask any of them
a question, for I should have been laughed at. I was often very sad
and forlorn; not a hand held out to help me" (p. 47). "My father
came home for a short time, and, somehow or other finding out what I
was about, said to my mother, 'Peg, we must put a stop to this, or