VARIATION IN MAN AND WOMAN. 237 



VARIATION IN MAN AND WOMAN. 



By HAVELOCK ELLIS. 



A RE variations more common in males than in females? That 

 --*- is a question which has passed through various phases during 

 the past century. John Hunter, who touched on the matter from a 

 biological standpoint, vaguely indicated that males are more variable 

 than females. Meckel, on the contrary, came to the conclusion, on 

 pathological grounds, that in the human species females show a 

 greater degree of variability, and he thought that since man is the 

 superior animal and variation a sign of inferiority the conclusion was 

 justified. ' ' We may state as a principle, ' ' Meckel wrote ninety years 

 ago at the outset of his manual of descriptive and pathological anat- 

 omy, "that anomalies are more common in the female. This phe- 

 nomenon seems to depend on the eighth law [Meckel's 'law of develop- 

 ment,' according to which woman is more primitive than man] since 

 the organization of the female results from development being arrested 

 at an inferior degree." But while he regards deviations as on the 

 whole more common in woman he admits certain exceptions, and more 

 especially instances the heart and the bladder as more variable in man. 

 Meckel was a profound student of anatomy, but not a very lu- 

 minous thinker. Some years later Burdach took up the question in 

 his ' Physiologie. ' That great biologist at once raised the problem to 

 a higher level, realized its wider bearings and cleared away the preju- 

 dices which had surrounded it. He recognized that in some respects 

 women are more variable than men, but pointed out that, contrary 

 to Meckel's opinion, this was no indication of woman's organic inferi- 

 ority. He showed from the statistics of the Anatomical Institute of 

 Konigsberg that we must distinguish between different kinds of ab- 

 normality. Further he referred to the facts that indicate that woman 

 is more childlike than man, but, he added, "it is a very common 

 but a very gross error to consider age as a scale of perfection and 

 to regard the child as absolutely imperfect as compared to the adult. 

 It is not imperfection but simply certain childlike characteristics 

 which women preserve"; and, he points out, it is in decrepitude 

 that women take on the characteristics of the so-called superior sex. 

 His general conclusion was that the nature of man and the nature 

 of woman are both excellent, but there are wider variations in men, 

 more genius and more idiocy, more virtue and more vice. 



