REPLY TO MISS HARDAKER. 7 i 



food consumed and assimilated." Man, by reason of his larger organs, 

 eats and assimilates more food than woman does. Each of his organs, 

 including the brain, is therefore capable of acting with proportionally- 

 greater energy. Hence, " men will always think more than women " 



(page 583). 



Collaterally our author finds that the demands of maternity must 

 cause a large subtraction from the smaller amount of mental energy 

 which women would otherwise exert, and, as the result of her funda- 

 mental propositions, she draws the startling conclusion that "unless 

 woman can devise some means for reducing the size of man, she must 

 be content to revolve about him in the future as in the past " (page 

 581). 



Before entering upon the question by means of her own original 

 and scientific method, Miss Hardaker makes the following statements : 

 " Students of physiology see that a final and conclusive law can not be 

 drawn from differences in brain- weights and measurements, because of 

 the present imperfection of data." But the superior power of the male 

 brain, like the superior power of the male muscle, is shown conclusive- 

 ly by its product (page 578). 



The figures which begin Miss Hardaker's argument are those which 

 all speculations regarding the brain take into consideration. These 

 figures are quite complete enough to indicate distinctly that the aver- 

 age male brain is always larger than the female. Miss Hardaker her- 

 self states that " all accepted authorities agree that the average male 

 brain exceeds the average female brain in weight by about ten per 

 cent " (page 578). Now, if the principle that bulk is power were ad- 

 mitted, the measurements obtained would be nearly, if not quite, con- 

 clusive of the natural superiority of the male : it would not have been 

 reserved for Miss Hardaker to make the discovery. Miss Hardaker 

 can not afford to dismiss brain-measurements as incomplete evidence, 

 for these statistics become the key-stone of her own logic when she 

 endeavors to prove man's mental superiority because of his excess of 

 brain. 



The student, however, does not reason as Miss Hardaker reasons. 

 He, as well as she, possesses the historic fact that the product of the 

 masculine mind has always been greater than that of the feminine. 

 He might, therefore, find that, as the male brain has been more produc- 

 tive, it is the better organ. Upon this point Miss Hardaker contends 

 that not only can we reason to the general quality of organs from 

 tlreir respective products, but we can actually arrive at a knowledge 

 of their structure by such processes of logic. " We do not examine a 

 muscle," she says, "to ascertain its internal structure" (page 578). If 

 this were true, the occupation of the anatomist would be gone : the 

 valvular arrangement of the heart, the cellular formation of the lungs, 

 would have been disclosed by an observation of the externally percep- 

 tible operations of these organs. The truth is, that we can never rea- 



