EQUALITY AND INEQUALITY IN SEX. 187 



Trainers of trick-dogs prefer males. Regarding the human species, 

 all known systems of legislation recognize an intellectual inferiority 

 of the female sex to the male, and treat woman as a minor not able to 

 take care of herself, and needing a guide and tutor. The allotment of 

 this position to woman has been determined chiefly by her levity and 

 frivolity, and the Roman law constantly invokes fragilita&em sexus 

 in justification of its statutes. The partisans of equality meet this fact 

 by alleging that the laws have sacrificed woman because they were 

 made by men. Moralists have also noticed that women are merrier, 

 more changeable, and more capricious than men ; they are likewise 

 more heedless and less circumspect. All philosophers and moralists 

 admit that women are more superstitious, more prepossessed, more imi- 

 tative, and more addicted to routine, more talkative, and more timid, 

 than men. Some men of science also hold that women are less intelli- 

 gent than men*. Broca says they are a little less so. Darwin remarks 

 that men go further than women in all that they undertake where pro- 

 found thought, reason, imagination, or the application of the senses 

 and the hands are concerned, and that if we should draw up a list of 

 the dozen men and a similar list of the dozen women most distinguished 

 in poetry, painting, sculpture, science, and philosophy, the two lists 

 would bear no comparison. We might also cite the opinion of manu- 

 facturers and merchants who, employing both sexes, have been able to 

 compare their faculties. All those whom we have consulted think 

 women are more assiduous but less intelligent than men. In printing- 

 offices, for example, women work minutely, mechanically, without 

 knowing very well what they are doing. They succeed well in reprint, 

 which does not exact intelligence, and poorly in manuscript. 



In the evolution of tastes and ideas, woman marches about a cen- 

 tury behind man. One might say that she is in the course of going 

 through the phases that we have passed in arts, letters, science, and 

 philosophy. The artistic and literary paths which man is abandoning 

 for the scientific road are now taken possession of by the female sex. 

 According to the librarians and the directors of reading-rooms, while 

 the men are interested in the study of history, philosophy, and science, 

 the women are still inquiring for novels. It is, however, just to add 

 that Europe and America possess a few doctresses, and that a day will 

 perhaps come when scientific careers will be disputed by women. We 

 are not authorized to conclude, from the fact that they have not yet 

 figured as inventors, that they will always be incapable of discovering 

 anything. The future only can tell whether woman is simply an imi- 

 tator, or whether she is a creator in the same sense as man. 



It results as a whole from this parallel between the sexes that, 

 among the superior species, the male excels the female not only in the 

 intensity of the nutritive phenomena, but also in muscular force and 

 intellectual development ; because man, more strongly nourished than 

 woman, fabricates more force than she, he is correspondingly stronger 



