Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/95

Rh And so, although woman may be more at home in the drawing-room or the nursery, than in the field of battle or the seventh heaven of metaphysics, her walk in life may exhibit qualities as high, and energies as well directed, as those of the chemist, the engineer, the philologist, or even the philosopher. Nothing can be more ungenerous than to flout her with her domestic cares, or to depreciate her efforts to please. If her form is more susceptible of adornment than man's, it is but natural that she should be more anxious to adorn it. If it is a privilege of her organization that she can become a mother, the wish to deprive her of it is not consistent with the teachings of science, with manliness of character, or with common-sense. If her maternity forces upon her the consideration of minute details which are unobserved by men, or have no interest for them, the tendencies of her mind are not a fit subject for detraction, unless that detraction be intended, as it commonly is, for maternity itself.

The elements of the female mind (to regard the mind alone, for a moment) are probably, as the champions of women's rights assert, identical with those of the male; and the inference which some persons would draw is that the mind itself ought not to be different. No one would seriously deny that woman possesses emotions, will, senses, and intellect; or that man's mind is susceptible of precisely the same division. It does not, however, require even a knowledge of chemistry to discover that combinations of the same elements, in different proportions, will produce compounds of different qualities. But chemistry, perhaps, illustrates the subject better than any other science. Not only may the same elements, mingled in different quantities, produce substances of different properties; but the same elements, even in the same proportions, may, under different circumstances, yield dissimilar products. Not only do the ethers differ from the alcohols, and each alcohol and each ether from its namesake, though all are compounded of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, in different proportions; but alanine and sarcosine—which are both compounded of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, in exactly the same proportions—have properties entirely different from each other. If, therefore, it could be shown that the male and female minds are, in the language of chemistry, isomeric, it would not follow, according to any natural law, that they should be identical in character; still less if they merely possess the same elements without being isomeric. And it would surely be not more unscientific to preach the conversion of all ether into alcohol, and all sarcosine into alanine, than to insist that the feminine mind should undertake all the functions of the male.

While the senses, and the faculty of retaining impressions, are as strong in women as in men, and perhaps stronger, it will hardly be denied that in all ages and in all climates women are and have been more prone to the display of emotion than of pure reason. Rachel