Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, February 1900: Vol. 56, November, 1899 to April, 1900Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, February 1900: Vol. 56, November, 1899 to April, 1900
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
Women are born speculators, and are peculiarly prone to invest money
and heart in bubbles. Being the power behind the throne, they can
carry men into action, and it seems to me that especial attention
should be paid in women’s colleges to the studies that cultivate
accurate thought and business methods. A certain amount of the study
of scientific methods and a study of common law might take the place
of the study of philosophy, psychology, and biology, certainly in the
first years of a woman’s college course, for psychology and biology are
studies which demand long scientific training and maturity of thought.
Recently I heard the following conversation at a bank in Cambridge.
The cashier was speaking with a young lady: “Miss ----, your friend has
overdrawn her account three hundred dollars, and you say she has left
Cambridge.” “Yes, the trouble with Jane is she is too much educated.”
A long residence in a university town makes one wary of educational
theories, but the proneness of women to invest in women’s banks and
bogus trust companies certainly seems to need a corrective in a new
college curriculum. Men can indulge in delusions and can recover
mental balance, and perhaps their fortunes; but women are apt to
become bankrupt permanently. Their experience in business delusions is
similar to that in affairs of the heart. Washington Irving says of this
feminine attribute:
“She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole
soul in the traffic of affection, and if shipwrecked her case is
hopeless, for it is a bankruptcy of the heart.”
More mathematics and science, and less philosophy and psychology, might
correct that vagueness of thought which leads both men and women into
delusion.
Now for our other remedies. Shall we have an academy which shall issue
storm warnings of scientific bubbles? I fear that the influence of
academies is waning, and that the conviction that there are as many
good men outside of the academy as inside would militate against their
dicta. We could have courts of scientific appeal, with judges appointed
by the State to sit on scientific questions of perplexity, and to
sift expert opinions. Such a constitution of scientific courts might
be a good thing in several ways--a saving health to the public. The
college professor would certainly be greatly relieved of endeavors of
promoters to use the name and reputation of the professor’s university,
and incidentally the little his own name might add. This remedial
solution is not in sight, and we must direct our vision in another
direction. We know that the newspaper can not serve us, for we seek to
kill sensations, and it seeks to live on them. We are bound to turn to
some journal or periodical which will publish only what it considers
sound science and will eschew sensational science; a journal which,
just as the London Times is regarded as the authority on political and
economical questions, will be looked up to as an authority on matters
of science.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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