extreme complexity of all problems, and the facility with
which the most upright judgment may become warped in meditating upon
them, they are prepared to exact a long apprenticeship in thinking from
those who assume the right to think in public, and a minute familiarity
with facts from those who undertake to defend any opinion in regard to
them. Whenever a writer, by previous and just reputation, offers
conclusive proof of such apprenticeship, familiarity, and ability to
judge, his conclusions must be examined with care, and disputed, if at
all, with respect.

Yet such examination is as essential to the interests of truth as is the
just ascendancy that may be acquired by repeated success in the
difficult task of investigation. Those who reject it as superfluous or
impertinent, or who decry opposition as shallow obstinacy, are always
those least competent to measure the weight of arguments on either side,
and whose approval of authority must be as valueless as the dissent from
authority certainly _may_ be.

The singular avidity with which the press and the public have seized
upon the theme discussed in Dr. Clarke's book on _Sex in Education_, is
a proof that this appeals to many interests besides those of scientific
truth. The public cares little about science, except in so far as its
conclusions can be made to intervene in behalf of some moral, religious,
or social controversy.

In the present case, a delicate physiological problem has become as
popular as theories on epigenesis, spontaneous generation, or Darwinian
evolution, and for an analogous reason. As the latter are expected to
decide in the doctrines of natural or revealed religion, so the former
is supposed to have a casting vote in regard to the agitating claims for
the extension of new powers to women. On the one hand, the inspiration
of scripture, on the other, the admission of women to Harvard, is at
stake, and it is these that lend the peculiar animus and animation to
the discussion. In both polemics, arguments are not accepted because
they are demonstrated, but enlisted because they are useful; ranged with
others recruited from the most distant quarters, with nothing in common
but the regiment into which they are all thrust, to be hurled against a
common enemy.

A remarkable change has taken place in the tone of habitual remark on
the capacities and incapacities of women. Formerly, they were denied the
privileges of an intellectual education, on the