"Female education in the best families went no farther than writing and arithmetic, and, in some few and rare instances, music and dancing." According to her grandson, Charles Francis Adams, "The only chance for much intellectual improvement in the female sex was to be found in the families of the educated class, and in occasional intercourse with the learned of the day. Whatever of useful instruction was secured in the practical conduct of life came from maternal lips; and, what of farther mental development depended more upon the eagerness with which the casual teachings of daily conversation were treasured up than upon any labor expended purposely to promote it." _Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife, Abigail Adams, During the Revolution, With a Memoir of Mrs. Adams_, by Charles Francis Adams, pp. X and XI, New York, 1876. [86] When the students of Girton and Newnham in 1897, after passing the Cambridge examinations--many of them with the highest honors--applied for degrees, "the undergraduate world was stirred to a fine frenzy of wrath against all womankind," and an astonished world saw re-enacted scenes scarcely less disgraceful than those which characterized the riotous demonstrations which, seventeen years before, had greeted seven young women at the portals of the University of Edinburgh. [87] _The Queen's Reign_, Chap. V, London, 1897. [88] Proposition third, of her _Propositiones Philosophicae_, Milan, 1738, reads as follows: "Optime etiam de universa Philosophia infirmiorem sexum meruisse nullus infirmabitur; nam praeter septuaginta fere eruditissimas, Mulieres, quas recenset Menagius, complures alias quovis tempore floruisse novimus, quae in philosophicis disciplinis maximam ingenii laudem sunt assecutae. Ad omnem igitur doctrinam, eruditionemque etiam muliebres animos Natura comparavit: quare paulo injuriosius cum feminis agunt qui eis bonarum artium cultu omnino interdicunt, eo vel maxime, quod haec illarum studia privatis, publicisque rebus non modo haud noxia futura sint verum etiam perutilia." This admirable work, with its one hundred and ninety-one propositions, is commended to those who may have any doubt regarding the learning or capacity of the Italian women who have been referred to in the preceding pages. CHAPTER II WOMAN'S CAPACITY FOR SCIENTIFIC PURSUITS In a curious old black-letter volume entitled _The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes_, published in England in 1521 by Henry Pepwell, occurs the following passage: "I mervayle gretely of the opynyon of some men that say they wolde in no wyse that theyr daughters or wyves or kynnes-women sholde lerne scyences, and that it sholde apayre theyr condycyons. This thing is not to say ne to sustayne. That the woman apayreth by conynge it is not well to beleve. As the proverb saythe, 'that nature gyveth may not be taken away.'"