Those who are still of the opinion of Voltaire and Proudhon--and their name is legion--respecting woman's inventive powers, might be willing to accord to her the capacity to design a new form of clothes pin, or hair crimper, or rouge pad, or complexion mask, or powder puff, or baby jumper; but they would limit her ability to contrivances of this character. But what would these same people say if they were told that over and above the things just mentioned for which many women have actually received patents, the much depreciated female sex had been granted patents for locomotive wheels, stuffing boxes, railway car safety apparatus, life rafts, cut-offs for hydraulic and other engines, street cars, mining machines, furnaces for smelting ores, sound-deadening attachments for railway cars, feed pumps and transfer apparatus for traction cars, machines for driving hoops on to barrels, apparatus for destroying vegetation on and removing snow from railroads, coke crushers, artificial stone compositions, elevated railways, new forms of cattle cars, dams and reservoirs, welding seams of pipes and hardening iron, alloys for bell metal and alloys to resemble silver, methods of refining and hardening copper, processes for concentrating ores, improvement in elevators and designs for raising sunken vessels? And yet, incredible as it may appear to these scoffers at woman's genius, patents for all these inventions, methods and processes--many of them of exceeding value--and for hundreds of others of a similar nature, have been issued to women during recent years. And the activity of the fair inventors, far from abating, is becoming daily more pronounced, and promises to reward their efforts with far greater triumphs. Indeed, women are becoming so active in the numerous fields of invention--even in such unlikely ones as metallurgy and civil, mechanical and electrical engineering--that they bid fair to rival men in what they have long regarded as their peculiar specialty. In 1892 a woman in New York was granted two patents, one for a process of malting beer and the other for hooping malt liquors. These inventions, however, are not so foreign to the avocation of woman as they at first appear. For, if we may believe the teachings of ethnology and prehistoric archaeology in this matter, women were the first brewers. The one, therefore, who two decades ago secured the two patents just mentioned was but taking up anew an occupation in which her sex furnished the first invention many thousand years ago.