Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/223

Rh superiority of either sex—at any rate a rather meaningless question—little or nothing appears. Woman's greater vitality and immunity from disease might be offered to balance her thinness of blood and preponderance of lower brain centers. Concerning the hypothesis of the infantile character of woman, however, the above summary is more significant. We see at once that a large proportion of her physical peculiarities are also infantile traits. The rounded form, the larger proportion of fat, the percentage of water in the muscles, the greater length of the trunk as compared with the arms and legs, the forward inclination of the head and of the upper part of the body, the deficiency of red corpuscles in the blood, the rapid pulse-beat, the character of the voice and position of the larynx, the large size of the thyroid gland, the contraction of the base as compared with the crown of the skull, the perpendicular forehead, the less prominent glabella and eyebrows, the smaller mastoid processes and the large parietal protuberances, the small, rounded lower jaw, the smaller, lower, and more prognathous face, the preponderance of the lower brain centers and the greater relative weight of the whole brain (if the latter be admitted), all these are distinctively infantile marks.

Let us now trace well-marked psychical differences between man and woman. It should not be necessary to state here that in all these studies average women are compared with average men, but not a little confusion has resulted oftentimes from comparing the best women with average men, or the best men with average women. First, as regards the senses, the popular opinion that woman's sensibility is finer than man's does not seem to be verified by experiment. Lombroso, collecting the results of Italian and English investigators, believes that woman's sensibility is somewhat more obtuse in touch, taste, sight, and hearing, and that her sensitiveness to pain is decidedly less than man's. But each of these conclusions is open to question. Careful experiments made by Drs. Bailey and Nichols in this country showed that the women had a finer sense of taste than the men, but that the men were superior in delicacy of smell. In sight and hearing no conclusive results have been obtained. Attention is called to the fact that piano tuners, and tea and wine tasters, are almost always men. In respect to all the senses more experiments are needed to test the comparative fineness of sensibility. Havelock Ellis, who sums up a large amount of evidence on this head, believes with Galton that women have, on the whole, somewhat less sensibility than men, and that it is their greater affectability or nervous irritability that has given rise to the popular notion of their finer sensibility. In respect to color blindness there is a remarkable difference between the sexes. About three and a half per cent of men are color-blind to a marked extent, while not more than