learned women would not marry and that men would specially ‘fight shy’ of taking to wife women who had done the same work as themselves. It may therefore be recorded that the first Newnham student to take a tripos, who was also the first lecturer appointed at Newnham Hall, married the professor of Political Economy, and that they wrote a book on that subject together. That the first classical lecturer at Newnham married a well-known classic and classical tutor of his college (Trinity); that the next Moral Sciences lecturer married the distinguished psychologist who is now professor of Mental Philosophy; that the first historical lecturer, Ellen Wordsworth Crofts, married Darwin’s biologist son Mr. Francis Darwin; and that the first woman to come out senior classic (a Girtonian) married the Master of Trinity College, himself senior classic of his year. Writing about the proposed Bedford College for women, in 1848, Frederick Denison Maurice had declared that “The least bit of knowledge that is knowledge must be good, and I cannot conceive that a young lady can feel her mind in a more dangerous state than it was because she has gained one truer glimpse into the conditions under which the world in which it has pleased God to place her actually exists.” So “ambitious” a name as “college” for a girls’ academy had a novel sound “to English ears.” To-day the words which excuse and explain its use sound strange and antiquated in ours. Many of the things about which men have fought and borne the heat of long days will seem incredible to posterity, and the refusal of a ‘college’ or of university education to women will no doubt be among them. No one else, nevertheless, had given to women the opportunity they wanted when Cambridge gave it. Cambridge returned affirmative answers to each request as it was preferred--in 1863, in 1865, in 1870, and in 1880 when in reply to a memorial signed by 8600 persons praying that the Senate would “grant to properly qualified women the right of admission to the examinations for university degrees, and to the degrees conferred according to the result of such examinations,” the Syndicate appointed to consider it returned the memorable answer: “The Syndicate share the desire of the memorialists that the advantage of academic training may be secured to women and that the results of such training may be authoritatively tested and certified.”[483] The irony of history required that this memorial, which led to the granting of the Graces, should be rolled and unrolled over the drawing room carpet of a vice-chancellor known to be hostile to the movement. Forty years after F. D. Maurice had penned the words already quoted women had come out at the head of the list in each of the principal triposes. The most striking instance of the misjudgment which it is possible to make about things simply because custom has allowed no one to try them, occurred at the dinner table of friends of the present writer when the