THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMAN. 



213 



superiority of either sex at any rate a rather meaningless ques- 

 tion little or nothing appears. Woman's greater vitality and 

 immunity from disease might be offered to balance her thinness 

 of blood and preponderance of lower brain centers. Concerning 

 the hypothesis of the infantile character of woman, however, the 

 above summary is more significant. We see at once that a large 

 proportion of her physical peculiarities are also infantile traits. 

 The rounded form, the larger proportion of fat, the percentage of 

 water in the muscles, the greater length of the trunk as compared 

 with the arms and legs, the forward inclination of the head and 

 of the upper part of the body, the deficiency of red corpuscles in 

 the blood, the rapid pulse-beat, the character of the voice and 

 position of the larynx, the large size of the thyroid gland, the con- 

 traction of the base as compared with the crown of the skull, the 

 perpendicular forehead, the less prominent glabella and eyebrows, 

 the smaller mastoid processes and the large parietal protuber- 

 ances, the small, rounded lower jaw, the smaller, lower, and more 

 prognathous face, the preponderance of the lower brain centers 

 and the greater relative weight of the whole brain (if the latter 

 be admitted), all these are distinctively infantile marks. 



Let us now trace well-marked psychical differences between 

 man and woman. It should not be necessary to state here that in 

 all these studies average women are compared with average men, 

 but not a little confusion has resulted oftentimes from comparing 

 the best women with average men, or the best men with average 

 women. First, as regards the senses, the popular opinion that 

 woman's sensibility is finer than man's does not seem to be verified 

 by experiment. Lombroso, collecting the results of Italian and 

 English investigators, believes that woman's sensibility is some- 

 what more obtuse in touch, taste, sight, and hearing, and that her 

 sensitiveness to pain is decidedly less than man's. But each of 

 these conclusions is open to question. Careful experiments made 

 by Drs. Bailey and Nichols in this country showed that the women 

 had a finer sense of taste than the men, but that the men were 

 superior in delicacy of smell. In sight and hearing no conclusive 

 results have been obtained. Attention is called to the fact that 

 piano tuners, and tea and wine tasters, are almost always men. 

 In respect to all the senses more experiments are needed to 

 test the comparative fineness of sensibility. Havelock Ellis, who 

 sums up a large amount of evidence on this head, believes with 

 Galton that women have, on the whole, somewhat less sensibil- 

 ity than men, and that it is their greater affectability or nervous 

 irritability that has given rise to the popular notion of their finer 

 sensibility. In respect to color blindness there is a remarkable 

 difference between the sexes. About three and a half per cent 

 of men are color-blind to a marked extent, while not more than 



