and they might have reflected
that without that portion of the art of seamanship every vessel
unprovided with steam would assuredly drift upon a lee-shore; but it was
not in the feminine nature to make a scientific observation of that
kind. You will answer, perhaps, that I could scarcely expect ladies to
investigate men's business, and that seamanship is essentially the
business of our own sex. But the truth is, that all English people, no
matter of what sex, have so direct an interest in the maritime activity
of England, that they might reasonably be expected to know the one
primary conquest on which for many centuries that activity has depended,
the conquest of the opposing wind, the sublimest of the early victories
of science. And this absence of curiosity in women extends to things
they use every day. They never seem to want to know the insides of
things as we do. All ladies know that steam makes a locomotive go; but
they rest satisfied with that, and do not inquire further _how_ the
steam sets the wheels in motion. They know that it is necessary to wind
up their watches, but they do not care to inquire into the real effects
of that little exercise of force.

Now this absence of the investigating spirit has very wide and important
consequences. The first consequence of it is that women do not naturally
accumulate accurate knowledge. Left to themselves, they accept various
kinds of teaching, but they do not by any analysis of their own either
put that teaching to any serious intellectual test, or qualify
themselves for any extension of it by independent and original
discovery. We of the male sex are seldom clearly aware how much of our
practical force, of the force which discovers and originates, is due to
our common habit of analytical observation; yet it is scarcely too much
to say that most of our inventions have been suggested by actually or
intellectually pulling something else in pieces. And such of our
discoveries as cannot be traced directly to analysis are almost always
due to habits of general observation which lead us to take note of some
fact apparently quite remote from what it helps us to arrive at. One of
the best instances of this indirect utility of habitual observation, as
it is one of the earliest, is what occurred to Archimedes in his bath.
When the water displaced by his body overflowed, he noticed the fact of
displacement, and at once perceived its applicability to the cubic
measurement of comp