Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/214

202 "crotchet." In certain states of the moral atmosphere crotchets spread just as do epidemics—which they closely resemble—in certain conditions of the physical atmosphere and other surroundings of man. Who would attempt to deal with the cholera or the small-pox by ridicule, how pungent and incisive soever?

We purpose, therefore, to examine this movement in the light of the principles of natural selection, of differentiation, and specialization, and to inquire whether the relations of the sexes in the human species and the distribution of their respective functions are or are not in general harmony with what is observed in that portion of the animal kingdom which lies nearest to man—to wit, in the Mammalia. With the origin and history of the agitation, with the hopes and motives of its supporters, and with the ethical, sentimental, economical, and political arguments used on either side we have no direct concern.

Even a very superficial and popular survey of the class Mammalia will satisfy us that the structural differences between the males and the females of each species are by no means confined to the reproductive organs. The male ruminant, whale, bat, elephant, rodent, carnivore, or ape, is on the average a larger and heavier animal than his mate. The tiger, for instance, exceeds the tigress in size by a proportion of from ten to twenty per cent. In few, if any, species is the superior stature of the male more striking than in the one which approaches man most nearly in its physical development—the gorilla.

But the mere difference in size is not all; the female is scarcely in any normal case a mere miniature copy of the male. Her proportions differ; the head and the thorax are relatively smaller, the pelvis broader, the bones slighter, and the muscles less powerful. The male in many cases possesses offensive weapons which in the female are wanting. In illustration we need only refer to the tusks of the elephant and the boar, and the horns of many species of deer. On the contrary, there is no instance of a female mammal possessing any weapon which is not also found, to at least an equal degree, in the male.

Further, the superior size of the head in the male is not merely due to the more massive osseous growth needful for the support of tusks, horns, etc., but to a proportionately larger development of brain. Thus, according to the recent investigations of M. le Bon, "taking the mean weight of seventeen brains of human males, of 154 to 164 centimetres in height, and comparing them with the brains of seventeen women of the same stature, we find between the two a difference of 172 grammes (nearly six ounces) in favor of the male."

Summing up these facts, commonplace but not the less important, we see that in the whole mammalian class, man included, the males are distinguished from the females, not merely by larger size, but by superior cerebral and thoracic development, and by the more general possession of offensive weapons. On the other hand, trite as the remark may