Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/303

Rh Concerning many of these relations we know that men and women do not think alike, and that these differences are radical ones, and have existed many years, and yet continue to exist. Take the labor and the ballot questions as the most widely known of the points of disagreement, which seem to have their origin in sexual mental attributes. But, even upon these questions, we find many men and women thinking and acting alike. Yet these are the exception, and not the rule; which confirms my idea of the difference in the results reached by the mental processes of the sexes: for surely the want of agreement must be a radical one in which it is a rare exception for the two types of mind to approach each other upon matters other than the organic emotions. Keeping in view the accepted fact that the brain, as an organ, or nerve-centre, is the seat of mental action, with which its structure, either in its histological elements or its relative proportion of parts, is more or less intimately connected, it seems reasonable to refer these differences in the results of sexual mental processes to structural rather than to any ephemeral cause. If we estimate the sexual factor in brain-development by the aggregate of results attained by the sexes, the way is clearer. The known average excess in weight in the male brain is the most probable coefficient of this excess in results. The face of Nature has fairly been changed by man's labor. The vast systems of railroads, of canals, of mountains pierced by tunnels, of lines of telegraph and cables, the steamships, the vast engines of war, the great emporiums of commerce, the results reached by masterly labors in science which underlie all these grand results, and in which women have been the accessories rather than the collaborators, prove that some factor, other than superior strength of bone and muscle, has led to this vast excess in results reached by man. These results represent brain-labor; and to what cause can we assign it, if not to this great development of the brain of man over that of woman?

In the organic emotions, and in the play of those finer feelings which form distinguishing mental traits of the sexes, we have the same reason to seek for a physical basis. As these mental traits are analyzed in the course of the paper, it will become more evident that the brain in the sexes is an organ embraced structurally in the sexual cycle. With this sexual factor existing in brain-structure, can woman ever hope, in entering the field of man's labor, to do his work in man's way? Will she write sermons, draw up a brief, or treat disease with the same facts before her, in the way of man? I do not believe I show disrespect to the sex when I answer, No. Women in literature have occupied a distinctive place. A book or an article in which the sex of the writer cannot be detected, no matter how studiously concealed, forms an event in literature. When woman labors either with her hands or head, notwithstanding she reaches the same result as man, she labors in her own way. All this, I believe, points not so