eir northern sisters at golf, with intent to win indeed,
but after all merely as a diversion.

This aspect of the woman of South America, however, is the only one of
characteristic form she has retained after her determined subduing of
national individuality to European commonplaceness. The lady of Brazil,
Peru, Chili, or the lesser South American states is not characteristic
in appearance, in custom, or in thought; she stands simply as a
modification of Latin civilization under variant conditions, and is
hardly to be distinguished from her European sisters of similar stock.
There is of course some individuality left among the lower class of
women; but even this is fast disappearing before the inroads of the more
insistent culture. As with the Mexican, so with the South American
woman: she has ceased to possess racial uniqueness and so has ceased to
be nationally interesting, however she may charm as an individual.

It is therefore rather in the individual than in the typical aspect that
there may be presented to the notice of the reader the names of some of
the more noted women of South American culture in later years. While it
is true that during the last half of the nineteenth century,
particularly in Chile and the Argentine Republic, the feminine status
underwent a marked change, coming into closer touch with the standards
of civilization in the more advanced civilizations, the woman of
prominence, in anything save politics, is still the notable exception in
South America. The most marked advance in this respect is to be found in
Chile, where, in 1879, the University and its colleges were, by special
statute, opened to women students, and where, in 1903, the Medical
School contained thirty-eight women, not a few of whom were taking
post-graduate courses after having passed through the regular
curriculum. The government of Chile actually sent as a special student
to Austria and Germany a woman, Ernestina Perez, who has since taken
high rank as a physician.

The advance in the status of women in Chile was doubtless largely due to
the influence of Mercedes Marin del Solar, whose writings first extorted
from Spanish masculinity a reluctant confession that a woman might
achieve deserved fame in paths hitherto thought to be sacred to the feet
of men. Born in 1804, when among her countrymen women were considered
mere child-bearers, she devoted her life to proving that her sex
possessed the qualities requisite for high at