It has long been a social mystery, over which conservatives and radicals have puzzled alike, why the gifted men and women of our race should spring almost exclusively from the intermediate ranks of life. The solution is found in Piazzi Smyth’s metaphor of the Great Pyramid. A circumscribed routine of pleasure on one hand, of toil on the other, equally engrosses the time and thoughts of the dwellers at either end. It is only in the middle of the pyramid that one is free to live up to the standard of the hideless coffer, the sarcophagus measure, the measure of a man! Of the feminine attainers to this measure, says a writer in the American Queen, the women who are taking up their lives and living them fully in all their length and breadth and dignity, as lives must be lived to reach the cosmic standard of the pyramidal man, there is found one pre-eminent type in that woman of letters against whom a hard battle is being waged to-day. To woman emancipated, freed from veil and harem, elevated from her primal position when she was but the toy and tool of man’s passion, this age of civilization points with a pride whose justifiableness has yet to be proved. Exterior liberty she has gained indeed; but in the face of the fact that this universal crusade against women of letters is but the determination to hold the old shackles on heart and brain, what is her alleged emancipation but a lengthening of the chain which still binds her in moral and mental bondage. “The shrieking sisterhood,” be it said in justice to the sex, represent a small minority. Few and far between are the women who would usurp man’s place on platform or at poll; still fewer and farther apart the advocate of woman’s right to drop her petticoat for the untrammeled freedom of the trousers. But the great-hearted woman, yearning for recognition as paramount forces of social regeneration—the great-minded women taking up the problems of life and grappling with them for the sake of their weaker sisters—these are many, confined and silenced within the gilded bars which society is daily drawing closer and stronger about them. This narrowing of woman’s sphere, this withholding her from anything but a mission purely physical, is but a different form of the old barbarism whose alleged destruction is the boast of the present day; and the time is not far distant when the wrong must be acknowledged and amended, or retrogression brand the age for which we so proudly claim progression! Let the hackneyed cry of woman’s intellectual inferiority prove its truth, conclusively, as it has not yet been proved, or let it be silenced forever! The cranial differences existent between the sexes, upon which the theoristic foundation of their respective superiority and inferiority of intellect has been laid, are, in truth, the exponents of sexual intellectual equality, science having proclaimed them the visible proofs of that mutual dependence and