When one reads of the sad experiences of Mme. Curie and Mrs. Ayrton with the learned societies of Paris and London, one instinctively asks, "When will the day come when women, in every part of the civilized world, shall enjoy all the rights and privileges in every field of intellectual effort which have so long been theirs in the favored land of Dante and Beatrice--the motherland of learned societies and universities?" For not until the advent of the day when such exclusive organizations as the Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences, such ultra-conservative universities as Oxford and Cambridge shall admit women on the same footing as men, will these institutions be more than half serving the best interests of humanity.[163] Women, it is true, are now eligible to many literary and scientific associations from which they were formerly debarred, and are, in most countries, admitted to colleges and universities whose portals were closed to them until only a few years ago; but until they shall be welcomed to all universities and all societies whose objects are the advancement of knowledge, until they shall participate in the advantages and prestige accruing from connection with these organizations, they will have reason to feel that they are not yet in the full possession of the intellectual advantages for which they have so long yearned--that they have been but partially liberated from that educational disqualification in which they have been held during so many long centuries of deferred hopes and fruitless struggles. FOOTNOTES: [158] _Lavoisier 1743-1794, d'apres sa Correspondence, Ses Manuscrits, Ses Papiers de Famille et d'Autres Documents Inedits_, p. 42 et seq., par E. Grimaux, Paris, 1896. [159] _The Life of Ellen H. Richards_, p. 273 et seq., by Caroline L. Hunt, Boston, 1912. [160] Mme. Curie, in an article which she wrote shortly after her discovery of radium, shows that she possesses a genius for inductive science of the highest type. "It was at the close of the year 1897," she writes, "that I began to study the compounds of uranium, the properties of which had greatly attracted my interest. Here was a substance emitting spontaneously and continually radiations similar to Roentgen rays, whereas ordinarily, Roentgen rays can be produced only in a vacuum tube with the expenditure of electrical energy. By what process can uranium furnish the same rays without expenditure of energy and without undergoing apparent modification? Is uranium the only body whose compounds emit similar rays? Such were the questions I asked myself; and it was while seeking to answer them that I entered into the researches which have led to the discovery of radium." _Radium and Radio-Activity in The Century Magazine_, for January, 1904. [161] _Notice sur Pierre Curie_, p. 20 et seq., by M. D. Gernez, Paris, 1907, and _Le Radium, Son Origine et ses Transformations_, by M. L. Houllerigue, in _La Revue de Paris_, May 1, 1911.