Have they lost the tender instincts of wifehood and motherhood? The records of the world are full of the unselfish devotion of great wives and great mothers, and the men who shine most conspicuously on the pages of history, from Cæsar and the Gracchi to George Washington and Daniel Webster, have been the sons of able and intelligent women. A cultivated intellect is not a guaranty of virtue, but it has never yet made a woman forget her love and allegiance to a strong and noble man, or turn a cold ear to the artless prattle of a child, though vanity and weakness and folly have done so very often. But it has many a time given her the power and the impulse to rear a world-famed monument to the one, and to give the best work and thought of a self-sacrificing life for the glory of the other. It is not simply heredity, but the atmosphere and companionship of the first years, that make or mar a destiny. But let us not confound intelligent women with pedants and pretenders, or great women with small ones on a pedestal of any sort, self-erected or other. All this I trust will be made clear by illustration in these pages, together with the fact that the intellects of at least a few women have been very much awake in all the golden ages of the world, and exercised on many of the same problems that confront them to-day. The question of equality has been discussed in every period. It is needless to pursue these discussions here any further than to recall them. It does not signify whether women have or have not done this, that, or the other thing as well as men--whether they have or have not been conspicuous for creative genius, or scientific genius, or any other special form of genius. It is as idle to ask whether they are, on the whole, equal or inferior to men, as to ask whether an artist is equal to a general, an inventor to a philosopher, or a poet to a man of science. There are certain things that will always be done better by men; there are other things of equal value to the happiness and well-being of the race, and worthy of equal honor, that will always be done better by women; there are still other and many things that may be done equally well by either. The final proof of ability lies in its tangible result, and it is a waste of words to speculate on unknown quantities, or to say that under certain conditions women might have attained specific heights which they have not attained. No doubt it is true, but one cannot deal with shadows. We have to consider things as they are, with the possibilities toward which they point.