Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/199

Rh Trainers of trick-dogs prefer males. Regarding the human species, all known systems of legislation recognize an intellectual inferiority of the female sex to the male, and treat woman as a minor not able to take care of herself, and needing a guide and tutor. The allotment of this position to woman has been determined chiefly by her levity and frivolity, and the Roman law constantly invokes fragilitatem sexus in justification of its statutes. The partisans of equality meet this fact by alleging that the laws have sacrificed woman because they were made by men. Moralists have also noticed that women are merrier, more changeable, and more capricious than men; they are likewise more heedless and less circumspect. All philosophers and moralists admit that women are more superstitious, more prepossessed, more imitative, and more addicted to routine, more talkative, and more timid, than men. Some men of science also hold that women are less intelligent than men. Broca says they are a little less so. Darwin remarks that men go further than women in all that they undertake where profound thought, reason, imagination, or the application of the senses and the hands are concerned, and that if we should draw up a list of the dozen men and a similar list of the dozen women most distinguished in poetry, painting, sculpture, science, and philosophy, the two lists would bear no comparison. We might also cite the opinion of manufacturers and merchants who, employing both sexes, have been able to compare their faculties. All those whom we have consulted think women are more assiduous but less intelligent than men. In printing offices, for example, women work minutely, mechanically, without knowing very well what they are doing. They succeed well in reprint, which does not exact intelligence, and poorly in manuscript.

In the evolution of tastes and ideas, woman marches about a century behind man. One might say that she is in the course of going through the phases that we have passed in arts, letters, science, and philosophy. The artistic and literary paths which man is abandoning for the scientific road are now taken possession of by the female sex. According to the librarians and the directors of reading-rooms, while the men are interested in the study of history, philosophy, and science, the women are still inquiring for novels. It is, however, just to add that Europe and America possess a few doctresses, and that a day will perhaps come when scientific careers will be disputed by women. We are not authorized to conclude, from the fact that they have not yet figured as inventors, that they will always be incapable of discovering anything. The future only can tell whether woman is simply an imitator, or whether she is a creator in the same sense as man.

It results as a whole from this parallel between the sexes that, among the superior species, the male excels the female not only in the intensity of the nutritive phenomena, but also in muscular force and intellectual development; because man, more strongly nourished than woman, fabricates more force than she, he is correspondingly stronger