And here we recognize the precise limit at which women are arrested in the study of the natural sciences. They are incapable of confronting it on _both_ sides. Michael Angelo has finely said:--"Death and life are but one. They are the work of the same master and the same hand." But women do not submit. Between them and death no compact is possible. This is very easily understood; they themselves _are_ life in all its prolific charm. They are born to give it. Whatever breaks the charm is a horror to them. Death, and especially pain, are not only antipathic, but almost incomprehensible. They feel that only happiness and joy should attend upon woman. Pain inflicted by a woman's hand appears to them very justly as a horrible contradiction. In the natural sciences there are three things they may master, the three things of life: the _incubation_ of the new being,--that is, the tenderness of its earliest care; the _education_, the _nourishment_ (to speak as our fathers did) of the young adults; finally, the _observation_ of manners, and the subtle intelligence of means of inter-communication with all species. By the aid of these three woman's arts, man may conciliate and gradually appropriate the inferior species, and even many of the insect species. To them belong entirely the arts of domestication. If childhood were less cruel, or at least not harshly insensible, it might share these womanly cares. For Woman, as a soft and tender child, full of pity, is the mediator of all nature. But as for death, as for pain, as for the lights which science draws from them, do not speak of them to Woman. Here she halts, leaves you on the road, and will go no further forward. She asserts--and the assertion may appear of some real weight, even to the sedatest minds--that science, of late years, has marched by two contrary roads: on the one hand, demonstrating by the study of manners and of organs that animals are not a world apart, but far more like ourselves than had been generally supposed; and on the other, when it has so clearly proved their great resemblance, and consequently their capacity of suffering, it ordains that we shall inflict upon them the most exquisite and most cruelly protracted agonies. Science, on this terrible side, closes itself more and more against women. Nature, while inviting them to penetrate it, checks them at the same time by their excessive tenderness of feeling, and by the reverence for life with which she herself has inspired them. Of all creatures, insects seemed the least worthy of being trained (or domesticated). They were sought only for their colours. Nevertheless, whoever sees in the pursuit nothing but a simple pleasure, will perhaps reflect for a moment when he learns that impaled insects frequently endure their torture for whole years! (See Lemahoux, and, particularly, the excellent _Bulletin de la Société Protectrice des Animaux_, September and October 1856.) * * * * *