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Little attention has been paid to the topic of science education in liberal arts colleges and seminaries during the 3 decades following the Civil War. This paper argues that Mount Holyoke College (Massachusetts) made a place for itself in the scientific community in the last decades of the nineteenth century by developing a curriculum which accommodated the school's commitment to science education with the opportunities opening for women in newly professionalized jobs, such as teaching, medicine, and research. The first section of this paper describes the changes in the structure and content of the science curriculum of the seminary from about 1868. The second part presents a brief intellectual biography of Cornelia Clapp to suggest something of the changes in the attitudes and consciousness of faculty engaged in the transformation of the curriculum. A final section provides information about the careers of graduates and suggests some further inquiries. (YP)