Above the Senior Wrangler! Pheugh! Where now are male reactionaries Who flout the feminine, and pooh-pooh Sweet Mathematic Megs and Maries? Who says a girl is only fit To be a dainty, dancing dangler? Here's girlhood's prompt reply to it: Miss Fawcett tops the Senior Wrangler! Would it not have rejoiced the heart Of her stout sire, the brave Professor? Agneta Ramsay made good start, But here's a shining she-successor! Many a male who failed to pass Will hear it with flushed face and jaw set, But _Mr. Punch_ brims high his glass, And drinks your health, Miss P. G. Fawcett! [Sidenote: _The Eternal Feminine_] Yet along with his acknowledgment of these scholastic triumphs, _Punch_ was equally ready to welcome evidences of feminine weakness in the haunts of austere study. In 1888 Miss Helen Gladstone recalled the fact that when she was at Newnham, a motion had been brought forward at the Debating Society that "life without gossip was not worth living" and carried by a large majority, and _Punch_ alluded to the incident under the heading, "_Nous_ at Newnham." To round off _Punch's_ educational record in this period, I may add that in 1892 he alludes to that irrepressible controversialist, Sir James Crichton-Browne, the champion of mutton chops, and common sense, who had condemned the higher education of women from the medical point of view. _Punch_ professes himself converted by a young Amazon who reduces him to pulp and humiliation by her prowess at games of all sorts. [Illustration: THE OLD, OLD STORY THE COLONEL: "Yes, _He_ was Senior Wrangler of his Year, and _She_ took a Mathematical Scholarship at Girton; and now they're Engaged!" MRS. JONES: "Dear me, how interesting! And oh, how different their Conversation must be from the insipid twaddle of Ordinary Lovers!" THEIR CONVERSATION HE: "And what would _Dovey_ do if Lovey were to _die_?" SHE: "Oh, Dovey would die _too_!"] The entrance of women into existing professions or the creation by them of new callings is in the main viewed with sympathy and benevolence. In the controversy that arose in 1875 between Mrs. Nassau Senior, who had been appointed an inspector of Female Pauper Schools, and Mr. Tufnell, an official of the L.G.B., _Punch_ espoused the side of the lady, who, he considers, had the best of it both in temper and argument. The statement in April of the same year that a lady had been engaged by a firm of solicitors as consulting counsel at a high salary, quoted from a Liverpool paper, was probably apocryphal; but it prompted _Punch_ to observe that the more employments fit for gentlemen that are opened to ladies the better. Any such calling is better than marriage accepted merely as a situation. [Sidenote: _"Jills in Office"_]