2 4 o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



If a reply has so far not been forthcoming from the writer against 

 whom this elaborate paper was chiefly directed, this has not been 

 either because I admitted the justice of its conclusions, or compla- 

 cently accepted a damnation to which I had been consigned in very 

 excellent company. The subject lay only on the outskirts of my own 

 field; I could claim no originality in it; all that I had done was to 

 sift and bring to a focus data which had hitherto been scattered, and 

 to show their significance. At the same time I again placed the 

 subject on my agenda paper for reconsideration. In the meanwhile, 

 it scarcely appeared that Mr. Pearson's arguments met with much 

 acceptance, even from those whom they most concerned.* 



Almost the only attempt to consider them, indeed, which I have 

 met, is in a review of 'The Chances of Death' by Professor W. F. II. 

 Weldon, in Natural Science: This sympathetic critic, with a biol- 

 ogist's instincts, clearly felt that there was something wrong with 

 Mr. Pearson's triumphant demonstration, although as the subject lay 

 outside his own department he was not able to indicate the chief flaws. 



There is indeed one initial flaw in Professor Pearson's argument, 

 to which Professor Weldon called attention; it could scarcely fail 

 to attract the notice of a biologist. We are told that we must put 

 aside 'characteristics which are themselves characteristics of sex,' like 

 gout and color-blindness, which 'without being confined to one sex' 

 are yet peculiarly frequent in one sex. Thus, we see, characteristics 

 not confined to one sex may yet be characteristic of one sex, and 

 when we seek to find what characters vary more in one sex than in 

 the other, we must carefully leave out of account all these characters 

 which are most clearly more prevalent in one sex. Professor Pearson 

 thus sets out with an initial confusion which is never cleared up. 

 His object, he tells us, is to seek such degrees of variability as are 

 'secondary sexual characters of human beings,' and we infer from 

 the course of his argument that the desired characters while not con- 

 fined to one sex must yet be peculiarly frequent in one sex. Yet 

 these are precisely the group of characters ruled inadmissible at the 

 outset! No definition of secondary sexual characters is anywhere 

 given, or on such premises could be given. 



Professor Pearson seems to assume that the conception of a sec- 



* Mr. Pearson has endeavored to find an opponent of the greater variational 

 tendency of men in Tennyson, who wrote: 



For men at most differ as Heaven and earth, 

 But women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell. 

 This argument, however whatever it may be worth had already been answered 

 by anticipation in a chapter of ' Man and Woman ' on the affectability of woman 

 in which I pointed out that the ' Heaven and Hell ' of woman are both aspects 

 of her greater affectability; not only does one woman differ from another as 

 ' Heaven and Hell ' but the same woman may so vary at different times. 



