MENTAL DIFFERENCES OF MEN AND WOMEN. 383 

 MENTAL DIFFERENCES OF MEN AND WOMEN. 



By GEORGE J. EOMANES. 



IN his " Descent of Man " Mr. Darwin has shown at length that what 

 Hunter termed secondary sexual characters occur throughout the 

 whole animal series, at least as far down in the zoological scale as the 

 Articulata. The secondary sexual characters with which he is chiefly 

 concerned are of a hodily kind, such as plumage of birds, horns 

 of mammals, etc. But I think it is evident that secondary sexual 

 characters of a mental kind are of no less general occurrence. More- 

 over, if we take a broad view of these psychological differences, it 

 becomes instructively apparent that a general uniformity pervades 

 them that while within the limits of each species the male differs 

 psychologically from the female, in the animal kingdom as a whole 

 the males admit of being classified, as it were, in one psychological 

 species and the females in another. By this, of course, I do not mean 

 that there is usually a greater psychological difference between the 

 two sexes of the same species than there is between the same sexes of 

 different species : I mean only that the points wherein the two sexes 

 differ psychologically are more or less similar wherever these differ- 

 ences occur. 



It is probably due to a recognition of this fact that from the very 

 earliest stages of culture mankind has been accustomed to read into all 

 nature inanimate as well as animate differences of the same kind. 

 Whether it be in the person of Maya, of the pagan goddesses, of the 

 Virgin Mary, or in the personifications of sundry natural objects and 

 processes, we uniformly encounter the conception of a feminine prin- 

 ciple coexisting with a masculine in the general frame of the cosmos. 

 And this fact, as I have said, is presumably due to a recognition by 

 mankind of the uniformity as well as the generality of psychological 

 distinction as determined by sex. 



I will now briefly enumerate what appeared to me the leading 

 features of this distinction in the case of mankind, adopting the ordi- 

 nary classification of mental faculties as those of intellect, emotion, 

 and will. 



Seeing that the average brain- weight of women is about five ounces 

 less than that of men, on merely anatomical grounds we should be 

 prepared to expect a marked inferiority of intellectual power in the 

 former.* Moreover, as the general physique of women is less robust 



* This is proportionally a greater difference than that between the male and female 

 organisms as a whole, and the amount of it is largely affected by grade of civilization 

 being least in savages and most in ourselves. Moreover, Sir J. Crichton Browne informs 

 me, as a result of many observations which he is now making upon the subject, that not 

 only is the gray matter, or cortex, of the female brain shallower than that of the male, 



