Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/224

214 four tenths of one per cent of women are so. None of the popular explanations of this difference are at all adequate. The difference is a constitutional one between the sexes in this era, and is no doubt one of the forms of the greater variational tendency in man.

The general opinion that women are superior to men in manual dexterity seems to be borne out neither by actual experiment nor by accurate observation of woman's work in the mechanical arts. Experiments by Dr. Bryan on rapidity of movements with seven hundred and eighty-nine school children showed that the rate was slightly greater with boys at every age from five to sixteen years, except at the age of thirteen. The same experiments showed that rapidity increased regularly with age. Bryan also made experiments in precision of movements, with the result that there was little difference between the sexes, the figures showing a slightly greater precision for boys. Gilbert's painstaking and accurate experiments upon voluntary motor ability in twelve hundred school children in New Haven, including fifty girls and fifty boys for each year from six to seventeen, gave practically the same results. The tests were based upon the number of taps that could be made in five seconds with the finger. The boys excelled at every age without exception. The average number of taps in five seconds for boys was 29·4, for girls, 26·9; but the rate increased in both sexes from an average of about twenty-one at six years to thirty-four at seventeen years. Gilbert's experiments upon the reaction-time of school children showed that the reaction-time of boys was uniformly shorter at every age from five to seventeen, and that the time in both boys and girls decreased uniformly with age except a slight retardation at fourteen. In respect to dexterity in the manual arts there is much conflicting testimony. Havelock Ellis's inquiries concerning woman's skill in laboratories, in the cigar and cigarette trades, in cotton spinning and woolen weaving, etc., led him to the result that with few exceptions the finer and more dexterous work is done by man in fields where both sexes have equal opportunities and practice. In the cigar and cigarette trades of English manufacturing centers large numbers of women are employed, but are set to the coarser and lower grades of work, men being required to make the finer grades of cigars and to fold the narrow margins of the cigarette papers. Instructors in laboratories in coeducational institutions with few exceptions pronounce the men to be far more skillful in the use of the microscope and all other delicate instruments and to require less direction in the prosecution of their work. The superiority of women in needlework could not be adduced in this connection any more than the superiority of men in many fields where women have not entered into competition with them.