Ida von Duringsfeld was a poet and novelist of considerable force. Her novels present strong characters and fine descriptions of landscape and architecture; her translations of Czech and Italian popular songs are excellent; her work on _Proverbs of the Germanic and Romance Peoples_, published by her in collaboration with her husband (Leipzig, 1875), is very meritorious. What type of woman she must have been appears from the fact that when she died suddenly on a journey, her husband, unable to live without her, killed himself the next day, to be buried beside her. The poisonous plant of the exaggerated emancipation movement appears in the works and life of Luise Aston, who impetuously demanded that all the barriers which custom, tradition, and artificial social contracts had erected should be broken down, for woman could fulfil her mission only in free love. When she tried to turn her theories into practice, she was successively exiled from seven German cities, and finally emigrated to Russia in 1855. Besides this academic propaganda for woman's emancipation, a practical agitation of the question was carried on by a great number of pure-hearted and clear-headed women. They strove only for the possible. They began to teach that woman cannot emancipate herself by opposing natural laws, by becoming a _Mann-weib_ (man-wife), as it is adequately expressed in German; but that she must retain all the peculiarly womanly traits, charms, and qualities, adding to them some art or science, trade or profession, by which she can support herself independently without being absolutely forced into marriage, good or bad, with or without her will. The leaders of this movement are consequently no fantastic dreamers or theorists, but energetic, earnest women. The novels of Julie Burow, Louise Otto, and others of their school, greatly influenced and aided the movement. Since their day the agitation has become universal: thousands and thousands of strong and earnest champions have arisen; we stand in the midst of the movement, in the smoke of the battlefield; yet, great things have been achieved; able women, like Luise Büchner, Lina Morgenstern, Hedwig Dohm, have not striven in vain. Breaches have been made in the walls of the sanctuaries heretofore reserved for men. Incited especially by American and Russian women, the women of Germany knock, and knock successfully, at the doors of the universities and academies. Even though they do not yet occupy academic chairs in German universities, as they do in America, they will do so in time. A Swedish university was the first to appoint a woman, Sonya Kovalevski, the great Russian mathematician, to a full professorship of this manliest of all sciences.