uction, Golovnin, who was
in office between 1861-66, promoted, in his quality of an opponent of
the classical method of education, by preference the study of natural
science. Hence a realistic tendency--often verging upon the harsh and
the crude--became the prevailing tone. Girls, sick of the idleness and
the conventional frivolities of social life, eagerly devoted themselves
to scientific pursuits, both as students at the new academies, and as
subscribers to the courses of lectures which were getting into vogue.
The very antagonists of the more extreme "emancipatory" practices
acknowledge that the greater number of these lady-students, who soon
were driven to seek for an opportunity of acquiring knowledge at a
foreign university--that is, at Zurich--distinguished themselves by much
diligence and talent, as well as by a spirit of personal sacrifice in
regard to worldly comforts.

At the same time it must be averred that some of them, yielding to an
exaltation and eccentricity easily aroused in womankind, mentally
overbalanced themselves as it were, and began to assume hideous mannish
and hermaphrodite ways. The close-cropped hair, the unnecessarily
spectacled face, the short tight jacket, the cigar, and the frequenting
of public-houses were unpleasant outward signs; but far more deplorable
was the cynic tone. These were and are the sad excrescences of an
otherwise laudable aspiration; but it may be hoped that in course of
time the excrescences will disappear. The sooner the better, else the
best friends of the progressive tendency among womankind will turn away
from it in sorrow and anger at the unsexing of the sex, whose tenderer
nature--in Schiller's words, let us hope not quite antiquated--is
destined to "weave wreaths of heavenly roses into the earthly life."

However, all the odd eccentricities, all the sad contempt of the natural
and recognised forms of beauty, delicacy, or even decency, into which
some may have allowed themselves to be betrayed by their eagerness to
throw off intolerable intellectual fetters, must not render us unjust to
the sounder aspect of the movement. Nor can those vagaries prevent us
from giving a due meed of admiring praise to the heroism displayed by
those nobly aspiring women, with whom the exaggerated manner is more an
outward form, whilst their self-sacrificing deeds in the cause of the
freedom of the nation and the welfare of the neglected masses, show the
true humanity and nobility