_Id._... “The application of the Pfeiffer bequest, ‘for charitable and educational purposes in favour of women,’ has been delayed by legal difficulties, but the Attorney General has now submitted to the Court of Chancery a first list of awards. Details given in the _Journal of Education_ show that Girton and Newnham Colleges receive £5,000 each, whilst Bedford College, Somerville Hall, the New Hospital for Women, the Maria Grey Training College, and a number of other institutions benefit by slightly smaller sums. The bequests will doubtless be welcomed by the recipients, for all the institutions included so far are doing useful work with very inadequate means, and it is to be hoped that the generous example of the London merchant and his literary wife will be often followed in the future. Women’s education—and girls’, too, for that matter—in this country is almost unendowed, and is yet expected to produce results equal to those gained in the richly endowed foundations for boys and men. The interest of the Pfeiffer bequest, however, lies rather in the spirit that prompted it and in the views of progress held by the donors than in the generosity of the gift or the precise manner of its distribution. In a letter explaining his wishes, Mr. Pfeiffer remarks:— “I have always had and am adhering to the idea of leaving the bulk of my property in England for charitable and educational purposes in favour of women. Theirs is, to my mind, the great influence of the future. Education and culture and responsibility in more than one direction, including that of politics, will gradually fit them for the exercise of every power that could possibly work towards the regeneration of mankind. It is women who have hitherto had the worst of life, but their interest, and with their interest that of humanity, is secured, and I therefore am determined to help them to the best of my ability and means.”—_Manchester Guardian_, June 7th, 1892. “Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckaback, why it does not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from that jobber. Ask the digger in the ditch to explain Newton’s laws; the fine organs of his brain have been pinched by overwork and squalid poverty from father to son, for a hundred years. When each comes forth from his mother’s womb, the gate of gifts closes behind him. Let him value his hands and feet, he has but one pair. So he has but one future, and that is already predetermined in his lobes, and described in that little fatty face, pig-eye, and squat form.”—Emerson (Essay on Fate).