Among the hundred and more professors whose opinions are given in Herr Kirchhoff's book there were, of course, a few who were not prepared to subscribe to the findings of the great majority of their colleagues. But the reasons they assign for dissent were, at least in some instances, little better founded than that of a certain professor of chemistry in the University of Geneva, who, a few years ago, gravely declared that women have no aptitude for science because, forsooth, in chemical manipulations they break more test-tubes than men. Verily, "a Daniel come to judgment." What probably more deeply impressed the German professors than anything else was the marked talent and taste of many of the women students for the abstract sciences, especially for the higher mathematics. For it had always been asserted that these branches of knowledge were beyond woman's capacity and that she had an instinctive antipathy for abstruse reasoning and for abstractions of all kinds. When, however, they discovered women whose delight was to discuss the theory of elliptic functions or curves defined by differential equations; when they found a mathematical genius like Sonya Kovalevsky speculating on the fourth dimension, and carrying away from the mathematicians of the world the most coveted prize of the French Academy of Sciences, they were forced to confess that another of their illusions was dissipated, and to acknowledge that they had no longer anything on which to base their long and fondly cherished opinion of the mental inequality of the sexes. As an evidence of the extraordinary change that had been effected among the conservative Germans in the course of a few years respecting their attitude toward the admission of the "Academic Woman" to the universities, and, consequently, toward her intellectual capacity, it will suffice to reproduce a sentence from the elaborately expressed opinion of Dr. Julius Bernstein, professor of physiology in the University of Halle. "After reflection on the subject," he declares, "I am convinced that neither God nor religion, neither custom nor law, and still less science, warrants one in maintaining any essential difference in this respect between the male and the female sex."[106] The controversy of centuries regarding woman's intellectual capacity was now virtually settled beyond all peradventure. Woman had conquered, and her final victory had been won in the heart of the enemy's country, yea, even in what was thought to be the impregnable fortress of her relentless foes. It was achieved where the proud Teuton male had imagined that he was unapproachable and beyond compare--in the laboratories and lecture rooms of his great universities--more irresistible, in his estimation, than the Kaiser's trained legions in battle array.