ig 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



observation is applicable to painting and the culinary art. Why is it 

 that, while all the men who devote themselves to the latter art become 

 good cooks, there are among the thousands of women who exercise it 

 as a profession so few of the first quality"? 



We have already seen that in mixed schools, where children of both 

 sexes receive precisely the same education till they are fifteen years 

 old, the girls at first are ahead by virtue of their natural precocity, 

 but, on passing twelve years, fall behind the boys. The arrest in the 

 development that takes place in woman at about this time is the real 

 cause of the growing pre-eminence of man, who continues to develop 

 till an advanced age. If the girl begins thus to fall behind the boy at 

 a certain point after having enjoyed the same training, it must be that 

 her inferiority is real, and can not be ascribed to a difference in educa- 

 tion that does not exist. 



Thus equality in the instruction of individuals of the two sexes, the 

 equal working of the brain, instead of re-establishing equality between 

 them, increases the pre-eminence of the males, and this explains why 

 woman is less perfectible than man. The equality of the sexes dreamed 

 of by the philosophers is, then, not near being realized. On the con- 

 trary, that equality which existed among the primitive races, and still 

 exists among some savages, is tending more and more to disappear with 

 the progress of civilization. The pre-eminence of man over woman, 

 which is a product of the evolution of individuals and races, is rather 

 increased by instruction, the effect of which, far from re-establishing the 

 equality of the sexes, is to assure definitively the supremacy of man. 



It would be interesting to investigate the effect of the environment 

 on the differences between the sexes. I am inclined to believe that the 

 differences diminish as we go south. In Italy, for example, according 

 to statistics covering a period of fourteen years, published by the 

 Minister of Agriculture, the excess in the height of men over women 

 falls from forty-two millimetres (1*63 inch) in the northern provinces 

 to twenty-nine millimetres (1*13 inch) in the southern provinces. Ac- 

 cording to Broca, women are more nearly of the same size as men in 

 mountainous than in flat countries. To summarize our argument, the 

 pre-eminence of the female sex over the male, occurring only in certain 

 inferior species and races, and in children of the superior races, marks 

 an inferior degree of evolution. The same may be said of equality of 

 the sexes, which is observable only among individuals little advanced 

 in evolution : inferior races and species, youth, aged persons, and the 

 lower classes. On the contrary, the pre-eminence of the male over 

 the female represents a superior phase of evolution, for it characterizes 

 superior species and races, the adult age, and the higher classes. In 

 the moral as in the physical point of view, evolution appears to me, 

 then, to advance from the pre-eminence of the female sex to that of 

 the male sex ; equality of the sexes would thus be a stage in the nat- 

 ural transition between the two opposite phases of evolution. 



