2
upon and pressed into the service to point the moral and adorn the tale of the favourite theory.
No one, as far as we are aware, has seriously set him or herself to proving the theory to have any foundation at all. Starting with the assumption, the state of things it implies has been deplored, people have tried to explain it, to suggest remedies for it, but tested it has never been. We all know the story of King Charles II. and the Royal Society; how the Merry Monarch, shortly after the institution of that learned body, propounded a problem for its solution, to wit, why a dead fish weighed more than a live one? Many were the explanations suggested, till at length one bold man proposed that they should come back to first principles, and have a dead fish and a live fish respectively placed in the scales before them. The proposition was received with horror, one member alleging that to doubt the fact amounted to nothing less than high treason. After much difficulty, however, the bold man got his way; the matter was put to the test, when, to the utter discomfiture of the loyal members, the alleged fact which they were seeking to explain evinced itself as but a figment of the Royal fancy.
We propose in the following paragraphs to consider whether the matter does not stand similarly only very much "more so" as regards the conventional notion of the legal and social disabilities of women. In the present paper we shall merely confine ourselves to the legal aspects of the question.
It will not, we think, take us long to convince ourselves that the allegations on this subject which the present generation, at least, has had dinned into its ears from all sides since its infancy, are even on a less favourable footing as regards accuracy. Charles II. thought the dead fish weighed heavier than the live one. The event only proved that they weighed the same—not that
