Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/404

390 a practical recognition of these things that leads to chivalry; and even those artificial courtesies which wear the mark of chivalry are of value, as showing what may be termed a conventional acquiescence in the truth that underlies them. This truth is, that the highest type of manhood can only then be reached when the heart and mind have been so far purified from the dross of a brutal ancestry as genuinely to appreciate, to admire, and to reverence the greatness, the beauty, and the strength which have been made perfect in the weakness of womanhood.

I will now pass on to consider the causes which have probably operated in producing all these mental differences between men and women. We have already seen that differences of the same kind occur throughout the whole mammalian series, and therefore we must begin by looking below the conditions of merely human life for the original causes of these differences in their most general form. Nor have we far to seek. The Darwinian principles of selection both natural and sexual—if ever they have operated in any department of organic nature, must certainly have operated here. Thus, to quote Darwin himself:

Among the half-human progenitors of man, and among savages, there have been struggles between the males during many generations for the possession of the females. But mere bodily strength and size would do little for victory, unless associated with courage, perseverance, and determined energy. . . . To avoid enemies or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals, and to fashion weapons, requires reason, invention, or imagination. . . . These latter faculties, as well as the former, will have been developed in man partly through sexual selection—that is, through the contest of rival males—and partly through natural selection—that is, from success in the general struggle for life; and as in both cases the struggle will have been during maturity, the characters gained will have been transmitted more fully to the male than to the female offspring. . . . Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman. It is, indeed, fortunate that the law of the equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails with mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen.

Similarly, Mr. Francis Galton writes:

The fundamental and intrinsic differences of character that exist in individuals are well illustrated by those that distinguish the two sexes, and which begin to assert themselves even in the nursery, where all children are treated alike. One notable peculiarity in the woman is that she is capricious and coy, and has less straightforwardness than the man. It is the same with the female of every species. . . . [Were it not so], the drama of courtship, with its prolonged strivings and doubtful success, would bo cut quite short, and the race would degenerate through the absence of that sexual selection for which the protracted preliminaries of love-making give opportunity. The willy-nilly disposition of the female is as apparent in the butterfly as in the man, and must have been continually favored from the earliest stages of animal evolution down to the