Welcome to Litsy!

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Purchase of the North Pole or Earth Topsy Turvy A Sequel to a Trip to the Moon The Purchase of the North Pole CHAPTER I THE NORTH POLAR PRACTICAL ASSOCIATION ND so, Mr. Maston, you consider that a woman can do nothing for the advance of the mathematical or experimental sciences? To my extreme regret, Mrs. Scorbitt, said J. T. Maston, I am obliged to say so. That there have been many remarkable female mathematicians, especially in Russia, I willingly admit; but with her cerebral conformation it is not in a woman to become an Archimedes or a Newton. Then, Mr. Maston, allow me to protest in the name of my sex? Sex all the more charming, Mrs. Scorbitt, from its never having taken to transcendental studies! According to you, Mr. Maston, if a woman had seen an apple fall she would never have been able to discover the laws of universal gravitation as did the illustrious Englishman at the close of the seventeenth century 1 In seeing an apple fall, Mrs. Scorbitt, a woman would have only one idea?to eat it, after the example of our mother Eve. You deny us all aptitude for the higher speculations? All aptitude? No, Mrs. Scorbitt. But I would ask you to remember that since there have been people on this earth, and women consequently, there has never been discovered a feminine brain to which we owe a discovery in the domain of science analogous to the discoveries of Aristotle, Euclid, Kepler, or Laplace. Is that a reason? Is it inevitable that the future should be as the past? Hum! That which has not happened for thousands of years is not likely to happen. Then we must resign ourselves to our fate, Mr. Mas- ton. And as we are indeed good? And how good! interrupted J. T. Maston, with all the amiable gallantry of which...