ABSTRACT
The facts are briefly as stated above. The reasons are obscure, and the explanations of the opponents do not tend greatly to elucidate them. They own that they need their money, they even with some unwillingness acknowledge the qualifications of the ladies already elected. Their one objection is that they ar.e women. And is not this enough? The geographical lecturers might " sometimes find difficulty in accommodating their arguments " to an audience of ladies, though what there is peculiarly unsuitable to feminine feelings in the description of the height of a mountain, .or the -0onfiguration of an island, it is difficult to say. Their (' sex and training," says Mr. Curzon, '' render them equally unfitted for exploration," and the names and deeds of Mrs. Bishop, Miss North, Miss Gordon-Cumming, Lady Baker, are powerless to shake his opinion . . His sense of propriety is shocked I He--no, we believe it is another Fellow-never attends a meeting where . both sexes are admitted unless he is properly chape--roned. We beg his pardon if we have misunderstood his words, " His family would not allow him to attend meetings open to women in their own right." A certain Mr. Hicks, himself not very well known as an explorer, asks indignantly," Was the Royal Geographical Society to be a learned Society or a pleasure Society ? " and votes for the non-admission of such ignorant persons as the lady-explorers referred· to. " No learned societies admit women," says Sir Richard Webster, and when confronted with the fact tha;t women are members of other scientific societies, of the Zoological, the Botanical, the Statistical, the Asiatic, the Hellenic, the Anthropological, and, it might have been added, the Mathematical. Society, all his answer .is, that these are not learned societies in the senEle that the Royal Geographical Society is learned, but are small Societies, or "Tea-party Associations." Itmay be asked how far the Royal Geographical is itself a learned Society? . .
