The women of Columbus' Century are worthy in every way of a place beside the men of their time. Those who in recent years have talked of the nineteenth century as the first period in the world's history when women secured an opportunity for the higher education forget amazingly many phases of feminine education of the long ago. The University of Salerno had its department of women's diseases in the charge of women professors in the twelfth century. There were feminine professors at the University of Bologna in the thirteenth century, and as a matter of fact in no century since the twelfth has Italy been without distinguished women professors at one or more of the Italian universities. Above all those who talk of feminine education as a recent evolution must be strangely forgetful of the women of the Renaissance. In Italy, in France, in Spain, in Germany, in England, there were long series of distinguished women, some noted for their scholarship, some for their artistic taste, some for their literary power, all of them for a fine influence on the men of the time and an inspiration to what was best. Much of the wonderful social history of the time is due to them, but there is no department of intellectual or moral uplift in which their names are not prominent. Vittoria Colonna, the D'Estes, the women of the House of Medici, the Gonzagas in Italy, Queen Anne of Bretagne and Marguerite of Navarre in France, Queen Isabella of Castile, Queen Catherine of England, Margaret More, Mary Queen of Scots, Margaret of Bourgogne, {xl} Lady Jane Grey, Queen Elizabeth--when was there ever such a galaxy of learned women alive during the same hundred years? Besides these known in secular literature there was St. Angela of Merici, the great founder of the Ursulines; St. Catherine of Genoa, the wonderful organizer of charity; St. Teresa, probably the greatest intellectual woman who ever lived, and other women distinguished for supreme qualities of mind and heart almost too numerous to mention. The hardest chapters of the book to compress have been those on Feminine Education and The Women of the Century. What they did to make their homes beautiful and their home surroundings charming, how they inspired the artists of the time, what they did to bring out the best that was in them, this indeed makes a difficult story to tell in a few pages. Their contributions to the intellectual treasure of mankind were not very large and only two or three of them have a name that will endure in literature and none of them in art, but what they accomplished for the ethical progress of the race at a particularly dangerous time when the study of pagan authors and of Grecian art had relaxed the fibre of Christian morality, represents a triumph of feminine accomplishment of which too much cannot be said in praise.