Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/473

Rh The law of sexual selection also comes in as a factor to account for the present relation of the sexes. Since our modern civilization there have ever been women who aimed to relieve their sex of their dependent relation to man. With this moral force ceaselessly antagonizing the natural relation of the sexes and the forces of heredity, why has it not, in a more marked degree, accomplished the noble purpose at which the more intellectual and stronger minds of the sex have aimed? To offer a reasonable explanation of this, I apply the law of sexual selection. Men and women do not appear to wed out of free choice, but in obedience to law which finds its expression in individual preferences. This, in the human family, may be called sexual selection. Mr. Walker states it in this way: "Love from a man toward a masculine woman would be felt by him as an unnatural association with one of his own sex; and an effeminate man is equally repugnant to woman. In the vital system, the dry seek, the humid; the meagre, the plump; the hard, the softer; the rough, the smoother; the warmer, the colder; the dark, the fairer, etc., upon the same principles; and so, also, if here any of the more usual sexual qualities are reversed, the opposite ones will be accepted or sought for." Dr. Ryan, in speaking of selection in relation to marriage, uses nearly identical language.

The annals of literature show that the most eminent of the sex either are unmarried, or are married late in life, and are thus often without issue. The women who intellectually leave their impress upon the age in which they live are the very class to which this law of sexual selection applies. The chances of this order of women leaving daughters who will inherit their superior mental vigor are greatly inferior to those of the average woman. The woman of the average, her mind and ambition being of the measure of the ordinary matters of life, not only seeks a husband by the force of education, but is sought by men. Thus, married early in life, she becomes the source from which the population is recruited. This, in my judgment, is not only a potent cause of the present relation of the sexes, but will serve to explain the chances of women becoming prominent in the professions of the future.

There is another set of laws which apply to this part of the subject. These are the phenomena which are observed in studying human increase, and are called the laws of population. The forces engaged in the evolution of nervous and mental (cerebral) structure are opposed to those necessary to reproduction. Mr. Herbert Spencer expresses it as an antagonism between Individuation and Genesis; and that this antagonism is more marked "where the nervous system is concerned, because of the costliness of nervous structure and function." There is no part of individuation so costly as that of cerebral growth. The more solid expansion of mind is accomplished after general structural