Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/385

Rh and combinations of characters which distinguish classes and individuals, nothing whatever has been done toward their quantitative elucidation, und we can only say that the phenomena are vaguely comparable as more or less.

To illustrate the difficulties of attaining exact, ideas in relation to quantity, we may refer to the history of chemistry, a science in which all the phenomena are at absolute experimental command. A century ago the law of exact proportions in chemical combination was arrived at, and, from the equality of affinity and neutralization among different bodies, they were held to be equivalents of each other, and the term "equivalence" came to be settled and fundamental in expressing chemical relations. But, after a hundred years of the closest thinking and the most exact experiment, we now find that the "old chemistry" is swept away, and the idea of "equivalence," which was its corner-stone, has gone with it. With the new facts, and finer discriminations, and broader views that have arisen, a whole crop of new terms has sprung up, and, instead of the equivalence of combining bodies, we now speak of their "univalence" and "multivaience," their "bivalence," "trivalence," "penti valence," etc.; and, finally, the whole set of relations has to be expressed by the general term "quantivalence." But if the conception of equivalence is thus discredited in one of its oldest and simplest scientific applications, what meaning can it have when applied to phenomena that have not yet even taken on the quantitative form? We can write down the contrasted characters of the sexes, as Mrs. Blackwell has done, and carry them out to no end of detail, and prefix the terms plus and minus to the elements that are brought into comparison, and thus give a general idea of Nature's compensations; but to undertake to add up or to reduce to any strict equational form these most indefinite things seems like trifling. With man the scheme of comparison is carried out to nineteen particulars, of which the following five are examples:

We looked over this enumeration with special interest, to see what value would be assigned to maternity, the grand function of the female sex, to which every thing else is subordinated. But it is either left out of the estimate, or must be included under products. Maternity is thus so generalized as to be described in terms applicable to both sexes. Now, we do not like this depreciation of the feminine side. Denying, as we do, the equality of the sexes, and holding to the superiority of the female sex, we protest against the degradation of woman implied in losing the supreme and distinctive purpose of her nature among the plus and minus products common to the sexes.

admirable translation of the work of Prof. Sachs supplies a want long felt in our literature. Students who have been cut off from the German work, by their inability to read that language, may congratulate themselves that, for once at least, the translation offers advantages not found in the original. The Germans, it is well known, are doing a very large proportion of the world's thinking, and it has been hinted that the German consciousness of this fact is perhaps somewhat exaggerated, and may sometimes betray its men of learning into an unprofitable ignoring of the labors of other nations. But no criticism of this kind will hold against the present volume. Its translators, being themselves eminent botanists, have enriched the work with comments and contributions embodying English thought and discovery in this important division of science. We may also add that the German work reached its fourth edition while the translation was passing through the press, so that the new views adopted by the author, and the new matter added, are indicated in the English volume.

This text-book of Prof. Sachs is at once comprehensive in scope, and minute and accurate in detail. It is the aim of the author