past session, especially seeing it may be regarded as merely experimental, having been thus successful, it is hoped that in future there will be a larger number of students, and that other subjects of study besides those already engaged in may get encouragement. We are informed that at the examination of Mr. M’Bain’s class, Miss Sherar obtained the highest certificate. At the examinations of the Metropolitan University, females have demonstrated the possession of acquirements sufficient to procure them high honours at the elder seats of learning on the banks of the Isis and the Cam. These facts ought to make us pause before condemning Sidney Smith for claiming, in the pages of the _Edinburgh Review_, perfect equality in mental endowment for women. “As long as boys and girls run about in the dirt and trundle hoops together, they are both precisely alike. If you catch up one-half of these creatures and train them to a particular set of actions and opinions, and the other half to a perfectly opposite set, of course their understandings will differ as one or the other sort of occupation has called this or that talent into action; there is surely, therefore, no occasion to go into any deeper or more abstruse reasoning in order to explain so very simple a phenomenon.” What is there in science, literature, or art, which the genius of woman cannot accomplish? If we have had starry sons of science, we have had starry daughters too. Not only has woman lifted the telescope, but she has lifted the pen, and written treatises of great learning and originality. “The Mechanism of the Heavens” and “The Connection of the Physical Sciences,” by Mrs. Somerville, would not have disgraced the pen of Sir Isaac Newton. We have had chemistry represented by Mrs. Marcet, and botany by Mrs. Loudon. Woman has risen to eminence in divinity. Miss Jane Taylor was thoroughly acquainted with that science. Medicine has had its female students. In early times, and also in the middle ages, female physicians and surgeons were as common as male; and sometimes the patient got enamoured of his doctor:— “No art the poison could withstand; No medicine could be found, Till lovely Isolde’s lily hand Had probed the rankling wound. With gentle hand and soothing tongue, She bore the leech’s part; And while she o’er his sick-bed hung, He paid her with his heart.”