Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/94

84 woman man's inferior because she has never devised a system of philosophy, any more than she is his superior because he lacks all her wealth of maternal tenderness, and some of her ready powers of expression.

Much has been said of the difference of weight in the male and female brain; and it has been argued that the female intellect must, for that reason, be necessarily inferior to the male. But apart, from the difficulty of finding a common measure for the two, there is great uncertainty concerning the relation of mental activity to the contents of the skull. The average stature of women is less than that of men; and therefore the absolute difference of weight cannot be a fact of any value, unless the various mental functions are localized. He would be a very bold man who ventured to pronounce that the brain has no influence over the muscles of voluntary motion, or even over those which are beyond the control of volition. And when inferior stature is found in combination with less development of the muscular system, who can say how far these conditions may be the correlates of some condition of the brain? It may be, and probably is, true that the brain is intimately connected with intellectual and emotional manifestations; but it is probably no less true that the brain is connected with all manifestations of volition; and, until we have determined the relative position and the quantity of cerebral matter necessary for combined muscular movements, we have no means of determining the quantity or the position of that which is necessary for thought and feeling. I am aware that many attempts to localize the various functions have already been made; but the mere fact, that the various inquirers and experimenters have arrived at various and contradictory conclusions, is in itself enough to prove that the Contents of the skull have not yet been correctly mapped.

Women of all nations are, I believe, generally considered to possess not only more emotional characters, but greater powers of observation than men. If this be true, it follows, I think, that their senses must be more strongly developed than those of the male sex, and that their memories must be equally if not more retentive. It matters little that the objects which they observe are not the objects observed by men. It is as great an effort for the eyes and mind to see and remember all the colors and all the forms in a room full of human beings, as to define the position of the earth's strata, and assign every fossil to its place. But women, on the average, prefer millinery to geology, and men, on the average, applaud the preference. The matters with which attention is occupied must, to a great extent, depend upon the bodily capabilities of each individual. The man who has lost his limbs cannot scale mountains, and the blind man cannot paint; but the energies of either may flow in a direction suitable to his circumstances, and each may distinguish himself in some field of thought.