Many thousands of girls and unmarried women live nowadays upon their earnings in a solitary existence. They are of all grades and classes; they have entered the professions, and even invention is numbered among their occupations, although the inability of women to originate is notorious. According to a statement in the _Times_ of December, 1888, ‘out of 2500 patents issued to women by the Government of the United States, none reveal a new principle.’ We have not many women inventors in these islands. Women have not had sufficient courage or rashness for dabbling in applied science, or meddling with mechanics. They owe even the sewing-machine, and all the improvements upon its crude beginnings, to man, and would have been content to wield the needle in slow and painful stitches for all time but for his intervention. It was left for the Government to bring the employment of women forward, and successive Postmasters-General have sanctioned their introduction to post-offices; but as post-office clerks they have failed to give satisfaction. They readily assume official insolence, and carry it to an extent unknown even to Foreign Office male clerks, who were, before the introduction of women into the Civil Service, supposed to have attained the utmost heights of ‘side’ and official offensiveness. Many have been the bitter letters addressed to the _Times_--that first resort of the aggrieved--upon the neglect and contumely heaped upon the public by the Postmaster-General’s young ladies. But this neglect and studied insolence has, it must be owned, been chiefly shown by these Jacquettas in office to their own sex; and ladies have been observed to wait, with rage and vexation, for the tardy pleasure of female post-office clerks in condescending to notice their presence.