No Brains! No Brains!

Some time ago Mr. A. B. See amused a public jaded by stories of crime and divorce by expressing his scholarly opinion that all women's colleges should be burned to the ground. Kinder, Kuche, and Kirche, in the good old German sense, was the proper province of female aspiration, and any attempt to educate them beyond the three K's was foolish and dangerous. The result of Mr. See's bull was to increase the endowment funds of Adelphi College (the specific object of his wrath) and to delight the many thousand intelligent Americans of both sexes who love to catch a Babbitt out of bounds.

Now Mr. See is agitated at the spectacle of women in politics, in business, in the feminist movement-in anything but the kitchen or the nursery. He has written Mr. Samuel Rea, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad on the subject, and in order to get a rise out of the women, sent a copy of the letter to the Lucy Stone League, an organization advocating the retention by married women of their maiden names. "Does not your Mr. Atterbury know that women average about five ounces less brain matter than the men; and that the part they lack is the reasoning capacity? Does he not know that if the world had to depend on the inventive or reasoning faculty of women, men would still be sleeping on the plains?"

Does Mr. See not know, his victims ask, that brain weight is no test of intelligence, that no one has yet discovered a demonstrable physical measure of brain power, and that so far as biologists and anthropologists can guess, intellectual. capacity is somehow related to the complexity of brain convolutions?

The indications are that there will be more fun-for Mr. See is writing a book on education. His style has the rare naivete of Rob Benchley (dramatic critic of Life), and he should go far as a humorist. Meanwhile he has lost a great opportunity to enhance his reputation, by refusing to debate the question of female intelligence with a woman.