Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/217

Rh power. That such difference, on careful examination, Will be found to exist is highly probable; but we must likewise expect that it will be found less distinctly marked the lower the rank of the species.

To return: the intellectual superiority thus claimed for the male sex, in virtue of a higher cerebral development, is fully manifested in the history of the various arts and sciences. In every department the first, the leading, minds have belonged to the male sex. Homer, Shakespeare, Phidias, Beethoven, no less than Newton, Liebig, and Darwin, are men.

In reply to this historical confirmation of what biology foretells, the advocates of the movement adduce three arguments, all, in our opinion, singularly inconclusive.

Admitting the superiority of the male brain in bulk and weight to that of the female, they maintain the existence of a qualitative difference which renders the two incommensurable. This hypothesis, however, is a pure assumption. We should have an equal right to maintain that the brains of different races of men, especially as existing in ages widely remote from each other, were incapable of mutual comparison. Or, in the same spirit, it might even be urged that the smaller size of the muscles in woman was no proof of any inferiority in physical strength.

Secondly, it is contended by those who seek to identify the duties, functions, and spheres of action of the two sexes, that many women have distinguished themselves in the arts and sciences. Admitting to the full this fact, we can only place it on a level with the kindred phenomenon that not a few women have, in disguise, entered the army or navy, and have acquitted themselves as creditably as their male comrades; or that others have worked long and undetected as excavators, in the construction of railways, etc. The savante—the woman of science—like the female athlete, is simply an anomaly, an exceptional being, holding a position more or less intermediate between the two sexes. In the one case the brain, as in the other the muscular system, has undergone an abnormal development. That such cases should occur need no more surprise us than does the converse phenomenon, the existence of womanish man. We meet with subjects, otherwise of the male sex, in whom the beard is scanty or wanting, the limbs slight and rounded, the voice high, the chest narrow, and the pelvis broad, or who, if they do not structurally approximate to the female sex, betray a preference for feminine occupations, which wins for them such epithets as "molly-cots," "cot-queans," etc. At the risk of somewhat anticipating ourselves we cannot suppress the remark that no one demands especial laws and institutions for the benefit of such womanish men, or proposes their exemption from the customary, duties of the male sex, how burdensome soever these may be felt.

The third and last plea put forward to explain, if possible, the cerebral inferiority of woman and her concomitant intellectual inferiority,