84 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



woman man's inferior because she has never devised a system of 

 philosophy, any more than she is his superior because he lacks all 

 her wealth of maternal tenderness, and some of her ready powers of 

 expression. 



Much has been said of the difference of weight in the male and 

 female brain ; and it has been argued that the female intellect must, 

 for that reason, be necessarily inferior to the male. But apart, from 

 the difficulty of finding a common measure for the two, there is great 

 uncertainty concerning the relation of mental activity to the contents 

 of the skull. The average stature of women is less than that of men ; 

 and therefore the absolute difference of weight cannot be a fact of any 

 value, unless the various mental functions are localized. He would 

 be a very bold man who ventured to pronounce that the brain has no 

 influence over the muscles of voluntary motion, or even over those 

 which are beyond the control of volition. And when inferior stature 

 is found in combination with less development of the muscular sys- 

 tem, who can say how far these conditions may be the correlates of 

 some condition of the brain ? It may be, and probably is, true that 

 the brain is intimately connected with intellectual and emotional 

 manifestations ; but it is probably no less true that the brain is con- 

 nected with all manifestations of volition ; and, until we have deter- 

 mined the relative position and the quantity of cerebral matter ne- 

 cessary for combined muscular movements, we have no means of 

 determining the quantity or the position of that which is necessary 

 for thought and feeling. I am aware that many attempts to localize 

 the various functions have already been made ; but the mere fact, 

 that the various inquirers and experimenters have arrived at various 

 and contradictory conclusions, is in itself enough to prove that the 

 Contents of the skull have not yet been correctly mapped. 



Women of all nations are, I believe, generally considered to possess 

 not only more emotional characters, but greater powers of observation 

 than men. If this be true, it follows, I think, that their senses must 

 be more strongly developed than those of the male sex, and that 

 their memories must be equally if not more retentive. It matters 

 little that the objects which they observe are not the objects observed 

 by men. It is as great an effort for the eyes and mind to see and 

 remember all the colors and all the forms in a room full of human 

 beings, as to define the position of the earth's strata, and assign every 

 fossil to its place. But women, on the average, prefer millinery to 

 geology, and men, on the average, applaud the preference. The mat- 

 ters with which attention is occupied must, to a great extent, depend 

 upon the bodily capabilities of each individual. The man who has 

 lost his limbs cannot scale mountains, and the blind man cannot 

 paint ; but the energies of either may flow in a direction suitable to 

 his circumstances, and each may distinguish himself in some field of 

 thought. 



