Never before in the history of the human race has any such large body of young women been given the educational advantages for the development of body and mind which they enjoy to-day. From antiquity there have been exceptional women, who were highly educated and cultured, as in Alexandria, Athens, and in the old European universities, but up to the present day any tendency toward the education of the masses of women has been looked at askance, and in this respect the position of the people of the United States was long peculiarly provincial. To two men belong the great credit and honor of conceiving the idea of a liberal college education, and a medical college training, for women in this country. In 1865 Mathew Vassar, “having recognized in woman the same intellectual constitution as in man,” founded a college for women only, and thus gave women the opportunity for the same education that young men enjoyed at their colleges. In 1850 the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania was incorporated. The idea of establishing a college for the medical education of women originated with Dr. Bartholomew Fussel, of Chester County. The query arose in his mind, “Why should women not have the same opportunities in life as men?” Just how strong the public sentiment was against these movements, and the leaders of the opposition comprised the most prominent educators and physicians of the day, and what impediments they placed in the way, it is now difficult to realize. The opponents of the higher education of women urged three final objections: First, women were mentally incapable of receiving the same kind of intellectual education as was given to young men at college. Second, they lacked the physical endurance to bear the strain of mental work. And, third, such an education would render the young woman masculine—she would no longer be willing to look after the ways of her house, her natural affections and power to love would vanish, she would become unwilling to marry and bear children. Ex-President Eliot, of Harvard University, who has so long been the great educational leader in this country, in his paper on “The Higher Education of Women,” says: “During the past thirty-five years three distinct apprehensions concerning the effect of the higher education of women seem to me to have been removed. In the first place, there was a perfectly sincere doubt (because there was little experience to go upon) whether young women were so capable as young men of receiving what was then called the higher education; or, in other words, whether the young woman had the capacity to master by study the traditional subjects of the higher education. That doubt has been completely removed.