... year there were 9 Matriculation entrants [to the University of London] and Miss Alice Elizabeth Lee, a student of the College [Bedford College], headed the list and gained a prize of £5 for so doing.

To us now these successes seem everyday and unimportant or of importance only to the individual. To believers in higher education of women in the early 80's intent on showing what women could do, each success was a matter for enthusiasm. The friends of the College were duly encouraged.

Ladies' colleges ... are doing, no doubt, good work; but the work is not academic as is sufficiently indicated when we say that a teacher at one of the latter has been known to lecture on mathematics, and on physics, and on classics at or about the same time.

... for I have done nothing but the arithmetic, and I suppose a machine could do most of that.

The reduction from the family measurement-cards, the formation of the eight correlation tables, and the calculation of both variation and correlation coefficients have been undertaken by Miss Alice Lee of Bedford College, - a task requiring much labour and persistency.

Seeing that the average brain-weight of women is about five ounces less than that of men, on merely anatomical grounds we should be prepared to expect a marked inferiority of intellectual power in the former. ... In actual fact we find that the inferiority displays itself most conspicuously in a comparative absence of originality, and this more especially in the higher levels of intellectual work.

... tables of the skull capacity of some sixty men, and also of some thirty women, whose relative intellectual ability can be more or less roughly appreciated. It would be impossible to assert any marked degree of correlation between the skull capacities of these individuals and the current appreciation of their intellectual capacities. One of the most distinguished of Continental anthropologists has less skull capacity than 50 per cent of the women students of Bedford College; one of our leading English anatomists less than 25 per cent of the same students. There will, of course, be errors in our probable determinations, but different methods of appreciation lead to sensibly like results, and although we are dealing with skull capacity, and not brain weight, there is, we hold, in our data material enough to cause those to pause who associate relative brain weight either in the individual or the sex with relative intellectual power. The correlation, if it exists, can hardly be large, and the true source of intellectual ability will, we are convinced, have to be sought elsewhere, in the complexity of the convolutions, in the variety and efficiency of the commissures, rather than in mere size or weight.

I have been back three weeks, and on my road northwards saw Weldon at Oxford, and heard of a hitch in the way of granting Miss Lee the doctor's degree. A few days later a batch of papers reached me from the Registrar. The Joint Report of Sir W Turner and myself had been referred to the original examiners and the whole matter on receiving their report was discussed by the Senate, who sent all the material to myself and I presume to Sir W Turner also, asking certain questions. (They don't want to hear in reply before October.) I thereupon drafted what I had to say and, on returning to town last night (on the way to Dover), posted it to Sir W Turner.

Sir H Roscoe told me last night that Miss Alice Lee had got her degree. The mathematicians were however troublesome.

I am here as on other occasions apt to be vexed by her want of power of expression ...

The substance of this paper was presented by Miss Lee as a thesis for the London D.Sc. in March, 1899. After its presentation Miss Lee asked me to criticise and revise it with a view to publication. Illness in the spring of 1899 and later pressure of other work prevented my completing this revision until now. When Miss Lee started her work practically nothing had been published on the correlation of the parts of the skull; since then an interesting paper has appeared by Dr Franz Boas. To this reference is made in the footnotes at points where there is agreement or disagreement with his conclusions. The subject is of such great scientific interest, and anthropologically of such importance, that I urged Miss Lee to somewhat enlarge her original thesis by a series of additional investigations now incorporated in this paper. I have further rearranged a good deal of her material and reworded some of her conclusions, but the reduction of the material and the inferences drawn from it are substantially her work. My task has been that of an editor, who wished to mould the author's researches into a component part of a wider series dealing generally with the quantitative data for the problem of evolution in man. Such is the limit of my revision. I have passed of course nothing which did not seem to me valid, and have suggested to the author some lacunae which could be filled up by a consideration of additional data.

I have always felt we must go into the point more fully, since you laid stress on the view that ability was correlated with the size of the head in your criticism of Dr Lee's paper. There is still a chance that extreme genius may exhibit something abnormal in the size of head, but I think it is now pretty clear, if we are to look upon ability as normally distributed in the population, there is only a very small, practically negligible correlation between it and either the size or shape of the head. We propose next to find out whether there is a higher relationship between ability and health, strength and general physique, and then to test its relation to temper and moral characters, from the school data schedules.

Miss Elderton has been away with a bad cold. The radiators in the rooms have proved incapable of doing their work and we have had great difficulties. So bad indeed that Dr Alice Lee has resigned, which will be a great loss to me, although she had recently been a little difficult to work with. I know only one person her equal in rapid and correct calculation and that is Miss Elderton; we must keep the latter at the Eugenics Laboratory, if we can.

Despite her distinctions as a scholar and long years of work, she was not entitled to a pension, having missed out on University College London's occupational scheme and earned relatively little when she was in full-time employment. Pearson and Margaret Tuke, principal of Bedford College, pleaded her case to government, which led to a civil list pension of £70 per year, giving her a meagre, albeit welcome, income during old age. In retirement Lee, who never married, settled in Woodlands Avenue, Rustington, Sussex, and died at the Peter Pan nursing home, Rustington, on 5 October 1939. She was buried in Littlehampton cemetery.