Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/278

264 is unlikely to be a constant one; and, looking for variation, we may ask what is its amount, and under what conditions does it occur?

2. Difference in Mass and in Complexity.—The comparisons between the sexes, of course, admit of subdivisions parallel to those made in comparisons between the races. Relative mental mass and relative mental complexity have chiefly to be observed. Assuming that the great inequality in the cost of reproduction to the two sexes is the cause of unlikeness in mental mass, as in physical mass, this difference may be studied in connection with reproductive differences presented by the various races, in respect of the ages at which reproduction commences, and the period over which it lasts. An allied inquiry may be joined with this; namely, how far the mental developments of the two sexes are affected by their relative habits in respect to food and physical exertion? In many of the lower races, the women, treated with great brutality, are physically very inferior to the men; excess of labor and defect of nutrition being apparently the combined causes. Is any arrest of mental development simultaneously caused?

3. Variation of the Differences.—If the unlikeness, physical and mental, of the sexes is not constant, then, supposing all races have diverged from one original stock, it follows that there must have been transmission of accumulated differences to those of the same sex in posterity. If, for instance, the prehistoric type of man was beardless, then the production of a bearded variety implies that within that variety the males continued to transmit an increasing amount of beard to descendants of the same sex. This limitation of heredity by sex, shown us in multitudinous ways throughout the animal kingdom, probably applies to the cerebral structures as much as to other structures. Hence the question, Do not the mental natures of the sexes in alien types of man diverge in unlike ways and degrees?

4. Causes of the Differences.—Is any relation to be traced between this variable difference and the variable parts the sexes play in the business of life? Assuming the cumulative effects of habit on function and structure, as well as the limitation of heredity by sex, it is to be expected that, if in any society the activities of one sex, generation after generation, differ from those of the other, there will arise sexual adaptations of mind. Some instances in illustration may be named. Among the Africans of Loango and other districts, as also among some of the Indian Hill-tribes, the men and women are strongly contrasted as respectively inert and energetic: the industry of the women having apparently become so natural to them that no coercion is needed. Of course, such facts suggest an extensive series of questions. Limitation of heredity by sex may account both for those sexual differences of mind which distinguish men and women in all races and for those which distinguish them in each race, or each