late Professor Fawcett, in urging the claims of women to university education, said: “I don’t say that a woman would ever be senior wrangler, but women would take very good places.” His daughter was to be the first senior wrangler: but at no other period of English history would the comparison have been possible by which a parent could test such capacities in his own child. After this it is not surprising that lesser men were unable to gauge the unused powers of half the race; and when one spirited person declared he had no objection whatever to women competing with men but that he considered the air of Cambridge would not be beneficial to them, the argument was as reasonable as any other. [Sidenote: Character and choice of work.] As to the character of the work in which women do best. It had been said that they would not do well in “abstract” subjects. The tripos in which they have taken the highest distinction is the Moral Sciences,[484] where they have been at the top of the list or alone in the First Class five times, provoking Punch’s cartoon in the ‘eighties’ of a girl graduate entering a first class railway carriage marked “For Ladies only.” Their best work has been done in pure mathematics, and, agreeing in this with the men, it is these subjects which they choose for the Second Part of the tripos. In choice of subject the order is as follows (_a_) Mathematics (_b_) Classics (_c_) History (_d_) Natural Sciences (_e_) Languages (_f_) Moral Sciences. The scale of success has been highest in Moral Sciences, then in (_b_) Languages (_c_) Natural Sciences (_d_) Classics (_e_) History (_f_) Mathematics.[485] The classical and mathematical triposes lead to those general tuitional posts for which so many women seek a university education; the languages tripos is easier for those women who go up without the usual school preparation; while the lower places in the history tripos do duty for that “ordinary degree” which is not open to women. It is therefore in the moral and natural sciences that there is distinct evidence of choice of subject: the proportion of women who take the former is overwhelmingly greater than the proportion of men,[486] and the taste of women for the natural sciences is as marked, a fact which might have been foreseen by those who watched the signs of the times many years ago. [Sidenote: The degree.]