Now this absence of the investigating spirit has very wide and important consequences. The first consequence of it is that women do not naturally accumulate accurate knowledge. Left to themselves, they accept various kinds of teaching, but they do not by any analysis of their own either put that teaching to any serious intellectual test, or qualify themselves for any extension of it by independent and original discovery. We of the male sex are seldom clearly aware how much of our practical force, of the force which discovers and originates, is due to our common habit of analytical observation; yet it is scarcely too much to say that most of our inventions have been suggested by actually or intellectually pulling something else in pieces. And such of our discoveries as cannot be traced directly to analysis are almost always due to habits of general observation which lead us to take note of some fact apparently quite remote from what it helps us to arrive at. One of the best instances of this indirect utility of habitual observation, as it is one of the earliest, is what occurred to Archimedes in his bath. When the water displaced by his body overflowed, he noticed the fact of displacement, and at once perceived its applicability to the cubic measurement of complicated bodies. It is possible that if his mind had not been exercised at the time about the adulteration of the royal crown, it would not have been led to anything by the overflowing of his bath; but the capacity to receive a suggestion of that kind is, I believe, a capacity exclusively masculine. A woman would have noticed the overflowing, but she would have noticed it only as a cause of disorder or inconvenience. This absence of the investigating and discovering tendencies in women is confirmed by the extreme rarity of inventions due to women, even in the things which most interest and concern them. The stocking-loom and the sewing-machine are the two inventions which would most naturally have been hit upon by women, for people are naturally inventive about things which relieve _themselves_ of labor, or which increase their own possibilities of production; and yet the stocking-loom and the sewing-machine are both of them masculine ideas, carried out to practical efficiency by masculine energy and perseverance. So I believe that all the improvements in pianos are due to men, though women have used pianos much more than men have used them.