point lies in the fact that they are different.

But the mad passion for equality has masked this obvious fact. When
women began to demand, quite rightly, a share in higher education, they
took for granted that they wanted the same curriculum as the men.
They never stopped to ask whether their aptitudes were not in various
directions higher and better than those of the men, and whether it might
not be better for their sex to cultivate the things which were best
suited to their minds. Let me be more explicit. In all that goes with
physical and mathematical science, women, on the average, are far below
the standard of men. There are, of course, exceptions. But they prove
nothing. It is no use to quote to me the case of some brilliant girl who
stood first in physics at Cornell. That's nothing. There is an elephant
in the zoo that can count up to ten, yet I refuse to reckon myself his
inferior.

Tabulated results spread over years, and the actual experience of those
who teach show that in the whole domain of mathematics and physics women
are outclassed. At McGill the girls of our first year have wept over
their failures in elementary physics these twenty-five years. It is time
that some one dried their tears and took away the subject.

But, in any case, examination tests are never the whole story. To those
who know, a written examination is far from being a true criterion of
capacity. It demands too much of mere memory, imitativeness, and the
insidious willingness to absorb other people's ideas. Parrots and crows
would do admirably in examinations. Indeed, the colleges are full of
them.

But take, on the other hand, all that goes with the aesthetic side of
education, with imaginative literature and the cult of beauty. Here
women are, or at least ought to be, the superiors of men. Women were in
primitive times the first story-tellers. They are still so at the cradle
side. The original college woman was the witch, with her incantations
and her prophecies and the glow of her bright imagination, and if
brutal men of duller brains had not burned it out of her, she would be
incanting still. To my thinking, we need more witches in the colleges
and less physics.

I have seen such young witches myself,--if I may keep the word: I like
it,--in colleges such as Wellesley in Massachusetts and Bryn Mawr in
Pennsylvania, where there isn't a man allowed within the three mile
limit. To my mind, they do infinitely better thus by themse