In all ages woman may lament the ungallant silence of the historian. His pen is the record of sterner actions than are usually the vocation of the gentler sex, and it is only when fair individuals have been by extraneous circumstances thrown out, as it were, on the canvas of human affairs--when they have been forced into a publicity little consistent with their natural sphere--that they have become his theme. Consequently those domestic virtues which are woman's greatest pride, those retiring characteristics which are her most becoming ornament, those gentle occupations which are her best employment, find no record on pages whose chief aim and end is the blazoning of manly heroism, of royal disputations, or of trumpet-stirring records. And if this is the case even with historians of enlightened times, who have the gallantry to allow woman to be a component part of creation, we can hardly wonder that in darker days she should be utterly and entirely overlooked. Mohammed asserted that women had no souls; and moreover, that, setting aside the "diviner part," there had only existed _four_ of whom the mundane qualifications entitled them to any degree of approbation. Before him, Aristotle had asserted that Nature only formed women when and because she found that the imperfection of matter did not permit her to carry on the world without them. This complimentary doctrine has not wanted supporters. "Des hommes tres sages ont ecrit que la Nature, dont l'intention et le dessein est toujours de tendre a la perfection, ne produirait s'il etait possible, jamais que des hommes, et que quand il nait une femme c'est un monstre dans l'ordre de ses productions, ne expressement contre sa volonte: ils ajoutent, que, comme on voit naitre un homme aveugle, boiteux, ou avec quelqu'autre defaut nature; et comme on voit a certains arbres des fruits qui ne murissent jamais; ainsi l'on peut dire que la femme est un animal produit par accident et par le hasard."[1] Without touching upon this extreme assertion that woman is but "un monstre," an animal produced by chance, we may observe briefly, that women have ever, with some few exceptions,[2] been considered as a degraded and humiliated race, until the promulgation of the Christian religion elevated them in society: and that this distinction still exists is evident from the difference at this moment exhibited between the countries professing Mohammedanism and those professing Christianity.