imes observed elaborate
accounts of the evolution of the human home, beginning with the huts
of the primitive Simians. And in pursuing the very essential subject
of "clothes and fabrics" we have not infrequently found ourselves in
the midst of spacious preliminary dissertations on the structure of
the loom, beginning with that which was used by the Anthropenguins.

Now we would not for the world speak disparagingly of looms or huts.
We have ourselves examined some of them in the Hull House Museum in
Chicago and in the woods of Canada, and have found them instructive.
We suggest only that college life is short, that the college
curriculum is crowded, and that (except possibly for those students
who are especially interested in anthropology or in industrial
evolution) it would surely be a misfortune to learn of the Simian hut
and to miss Rossetti's "House of Life," or to get the impression that
as a "cultural background" for shirtwaists the Anthropenguinian loom
can really compete with Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus."

If this occasional tendency toward exaggerating the importance of
drain pipes, window curtains, and door mats were to grow strong, and
if girls, as a class, should be required to spend any large proportion
of their time on the specialized history and sociology of feminine
implements and tasks while the boys were still in the current of the
affairs of the race, we should indeed want President Thomas of Bryn
Mawr to repeat on a thousand lecture platforms her indignant assertion
of the fact that "nothing more disastrous for women, or for men, can
be conceived of than specialized education of women as a sex."

These parenthetical observations, however, amount simply to the
expression of our personal opinion that home economics, like every new
idea, carries with it large quantities of dross which will have to be
refined out in the smelter of trial. The real metal in it is its
attempt to establish the principle that intelligent consumption is an
important and difficult task. For that reason it will not only desire
but demand the utmost equality of educational opportunity. And women,
like men, will continue to get their "cultural backgrounds" in the
great achievements of the whole race, where they can hold converse
with Lincoln and Darwin and the makers of the Cologne Cathedral and
George Meredith and Pasteur and Karl Marx and Whistler and Joan of Arc
and St. John.

The woman voiced a great truth who said that the