Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 5 (1901).djvu/375

Rh say no less than that he is in his psychology as much a woman as a man; which is what, for my part (and vice versâ), I am inclined to believe—though, of course, in ordinary persons, the one or the other portion is, generally, more or less in abeyance.

Now it will be admitted—or, at any rate, it seems likely—that the principal differences in the psychology of the sexes have their root in the sexual separation itself, inasmuch as certain main channels of thought and feeling seem by this to be cut off from the one sex or the other, especially from the male one. In the 'Heart of Midlothian,' the old hag, who has once nursed Robertson, says to the thief, Levitt, "And man can never ken what woman feels for the bairn she has held, first, to her bosom"; to which he replies, "To be sure, we have no experience." Were this and many other similar propositions so true as they appear to be, I believe that such man-creators as Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, &c., would either have left female man alone, as not being content with mere portrait-painting—what we call "study of character"—or else that their productions in it—due to ulterior motives—would have been as notoriously dummies as they are notoriously not. But if either sex has lying latent within it (by inheritance dating from a long-past ancestry) the whole stock of feelings proper to the other, and if what we call creative genius is, or at any rate involves, the power of recalling and shaping these and other—to the many—practically lost possessions, then that quality of being another sex which a great poet or writer exhibits in his work is less difficult to understand. There being a foundation (the mental equivalent of those structural retainments which both sexes possess) dating from an incalculable antiquity, all the subsequent modifications and developments might conceivably have been added to it, the civilized man or woman receiving respectively the latest and highest touchings (not so extraordinarily high perhaps) of civilized womanhood or manhood, to lie—for the most part undreamt of—in that region of their mentality which has come right down from long-past hermaphrodite forms. Should this appear incredible, I would ask what is the real meaning of the facts which I have here given in regard to these Grebes, and which obviously cannot be explained—(as some other apparent abnormalities of this class observable amongst animals may