The Italians became so much impressed with the advisability of permitting women to study at the universities, that a certain amount of co-education has existed all down the centuries in Italy and not a century has passed since the Thirteenth, which has not chronicled the presence of at least one distinguished woman professor at some Italian university. Indeed it was doubtless the traditional position of tolerance in this matter that made it seem quite natural for women, when the Renaissance period came around, to take their places beside their brothers and their cousins in the schools where the new learning was being taught. It may be rather difficult for some to understand how with this opening wedge for the higher education of women well placed, the real opportunity for widespread feminine education should only have come in our own time. This last idea, however, which would represent ours as the only generation which has given women adequate opportunities for intellectual development, is one of those self-complacent bits of flattery of ourselves and our own period that is so irritatingly characteristic of recent times. There have been at least three times in the world's history before our own when as many women as wanted them, in the class most interested in educational matters, were given the opportunities for the higher education. As a matter of fact whenever there have been novelties introduced into educational systems, women have demanded and quite naturally--since, "What a good woman wants," said a modern saint, "is the will of God"--have obtained the privilege of sharing the educational opportunities of the time. This was true in Charlemagne's time when the women of the court attended the lectures in the traveling palace school the great Charles founded and fostered. It was true four centuries later, as we have seen, when a great change in educational methods was introduced with the foundation of the universities. It was exemplified again when the "New Learning" came in and the study of the classics took the place of the long hours spent in scholastic disputation, that had previously occupied {333} so much university attention. In our own time it was the introduction of the study of the social sciences particularly, with the consequent appearance of many novelties in the educational curriculum, that once more was the signal for women asking and quite naturally obtaining educational privileges. {opp333} [Illustration] MOSAIC (ST. MARK'S, VENICE, 1220)