tronomy be placed on the list of
honorary members. On the propriety of such a step from an astronomical
point of view, there can be but one voice: and your Council is of
opinion that the time is gone by when either feeling or prejudice,
by whichever name it may be proper to call it, should be allowed to
interfere with the payment of a well-earned tribute of respect. Your
Council has hitherto felt that, whatever might be its own sentiment on
the subject, or however able and willing it might be to defend such a
measure, it had no right to place the name of a lady in a position
the propriety of which might be contested, though upon what it might
consider narrow grounds and false principles. But your Council has no
fear that such a difference could now take place between any men whose
opinion would avail to guide that of society at large, and, abandoning
compliments on the one hand, and false delicacy on the other, submits
that while the tests of astronomical merit should in no case be
applied to the works of a woman less severely than to those of man,
the sex of the former should no longer be an obstacle to her receiving
any acknowledgment which might be held due the latter. And your
Council, therefore, recommends this meeting to add to the list
of honorary members the names of Miss Caroline Herschell and Mrs.
Somerville, of whose astronomical knowledge, and of the utility of the
ends to which it has been applied, it is not necessary to recount the
proofs."

Mrs. Somerville suffered from the educational limitations of her day,
and when she desired to learn Latin, in order that she might study
the _Principia_, she referred to Professor Playfair with regard to the
propriety of her doing so, and was assured by him that there was no
impropriety involved for the purpose she had in mind. At that time
there were many women with the best of education, acquired outside
of university halls, but such were usually brought up by scholarly
parents possessed of well-stocked libraries. To-day, the position of
Ruskin is a commonplace of experience. In his lecture on the _Queen's
Gardens_, he advised that women have free access to books, and
asserted that they would find out for themselves the wholesome and
avoid the pernicious with an instinct as unerring as that which
directs the browsing of sheep in pasture lands. It has been
sufficiently demonstrated that wholesome-minded girls are ever less in
danger of contamination from literature t