For instance, there is the well-established fact that women who have undergone "higher education" show a low marriage-rate, and produce very few children. However considered, the fact is of great importance. But the right interpretation of it is not certain. There are women of a type approaching the masculine, who are evidently so by nature. Is it these women, already predestined for something other than distinctive womanhood, that offer themselves for "higher education"? In other words, is there a selective process at work, the results of which in choosing a certain type of woman we attribute to the education undergone? If we answer this question wrongly, and act upon our erroneous interpretation, we shall certainly do grave injury to individuals and society. Thus, we might roundly condemn the higher education of women _in toto_, and hold up the "domestic woman" as the sole type to which every woman can and must be made to conform. Or, on the other hand, we may argue that it is well to provide suitable opportunities of self-development for those women whose nature practically unfits them for the ordinary career of a woman. I do not think that any one who has had opportunities of first-hand observation will question the presence in university and college class-rooms of girls of the anomalous type. Each generation produces a certain number of such. Probably no education will alter their nature in any radical or effective way. On every ground, personal and social, we must be right in providing for them, as for their brothers, all the opportunities they may desire. But I am convinced that their relative number is not large. The great majority of those girls who are nowadays subjected to what we call "higher education" are of the normal type; and this is none the less true because the proportion of the anomalous is doubtless higher here than in the feminine community at large. The ordinary observation of those teachers who year by year see young girls at the beginning of their higher education will certainly confirm the statement that by far the greater number of them are of the ordinary feminine type. If this be so, the necessary inference is that education _has_ a potent influence, and that it must be held accountable for the observed facts of later years, whether those facts please or displease us.