refuse to address lyceums which thought fit to employ an occasional female
lecturer. Mr. Comer stated that it was "in the face of ridicule and
sneers" that he began to educate American women as bookkeepers many years
ago; and it was a little contemptible in Miss Muloch to revive the same
satire in "A Woman's Thoughts on Women," when she must have known that
in half the retail shops in Paris her own sex rules the ledger, and
Mammon knows no Salic law.

We find, on investigation, what these considerations would lead us to
expect, that eminent women have commonly been exceptional in training and
position, as well as in their genius. They have excelled the average of
their own sex because they have shared the ordinary advantages of the other
sex. Take any department of learning or skill; take, for instance, the
knowledge of languages, the universal alphabet, philology. On the great
stairway at Padua stands the statue of Elena Cornaro, professor of six
languages in that once renowned university. But Elena Cornaro was educated
like a boy, by her father. On the great door of the University of Bologna
is inscribed the epitaph of Clotilda Tambroni, the honored correspondent of
Porson, and the first Greek scholar of southern Europe in her day. But
Clotilda Tambroni was educated like a boy, by Emanuele Aponte. How fine are
those prefatory words, "by a Right Reverend Prelate," to that pioneer book
in Anglo-Saxon lore, Elizabeth Elstob's grammar: "Our earthly possessions
are indeed our patrimony, as derived to us by the industry of our fathers;
but the language in which we speak is our mother tongue, and who so proper
to play the critic in this as the females?" Yet this particular female
obtained the rudiments of her rare education from her mother, before she
was eight years old, in spite of much opposition from her right reverend
guardians. Adelung declares that all modern philology is founded on the
translation of a Russian vocabulary into two hundred different dialects
by Catherine II. But Catherine shared, in childhood, the instructors of