I should by all means encourage every woman who is born with musical gifts to study music; but study it as a science and an art, and not as an accomplishment; and to every woman who is not musical, I should say, 'Don't study it at all;' you cannot afford four hours a day, out of some years of your life, just to be agreeable in company upon _possible_ occasions.
"If for four hours a day you studied, year after year, the science of language, for instance, do you suppose you would not be a linguist?
Do you put the mere pleasing of some social party, and the reception of a few compliments, against the mental development of four hours a day of study of something for which you were born?
"When I see that girls who are required by their parents to go through with the irksome practising really become respectable performers, I wonder what four hours a day at something which they loved, and for which God designed them, would do for them.
"I should think that to a real scientist in music there would be something mortifying in this rush of all women into music; as there would be to me if I saw every girl learning the constellations, and then thinking she was an astronomer! "Jan.

8, 1876.

At the meeting of graduates at the Deacon House, the speeches that were made were mainly those of Dr.R.and Professor B.I am sorry now that I did not at least say that the college is what it is mainly because the early students pushed up the course to a collegiate standard.
"Jan.

25, 1876.

It has become a serious question with me whether it is not my duty to beg money for the observatory, while what I really long for is a quiet life of scientific speculation.