39 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



a practical recognition of these things that leads to chivalry ; and 

 even those artificial courtesies which wear the mark of chivalry are of 

 value, as showing what may be termed a conventional acquiescence in 

 the truth that underlies them. This truth is, that the highest type of 

 manhood can only then be reached when the heart and mind have 

 been so far purified from the dross of a brutal ancestry as genuinely 

 to appreciate, to admire, and to reverence the greatness, the beauty, 

 and the strength which have been made perfect in the weakness of 

 womanhood. 



I will now pass on to consider the causes which have probably 

 operated in producing all these mental differences between men and 

 women. We have already seen that differences of the same kind 

 occur throughout the whole mammalian series, and therefore we must 

 begin by looking below the conditions of merely human life for the 

 original causes of these differences in their most general form. Nor 

 have we far to seek. The Darwinian principles of selection both 

 natural and sexual if ever they have operated in any department of 

 organic nature, must certainly have operated here. Thus, to quote 

 Darwin himself : 



Among the half-human progenitors of man, and among savages, there have 

 heen struggles between the males during many generations for the possession of 

 the females. But mere bodily strength and size would do little for victory, 

 unless associated with courage, perseverance, and determined energy. . . . To 

 avoid enemies or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals, and to 

 fashion weapons, requires reason, invention, or imagination. . . . These latter 

 faculties, as well as the former, will have been developed in man partly through 

 sexual selection that is, through the contest of rival males and partly through 

 natural selection that is, from success in the general struggle for life; and as in 

 both cases the struggle will have been during maturity, the characters gained 

 will have been transmitted more fully to the male than to the female offspring. 

 . . . Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman. It is, indeed, fortu- 

 nate that the law of the equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails 

 with mammals ; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior 

 in mental endowment to woman as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the 

 peahen. 



Similarly, Mr. Francis Galton writes : 



The fundamental and intrinsic differences of character that exist in individuals 

 are well illustrated by those that distinguish the two sexes, and which begin to 

 assert themselves even in the nursery, where all children are treated alike. One 

 notablo peculiarity in the woman is that she is capricious and coy, and has less 

 straightforwardness than the man. It is the same with the female of every 

 species. . . . [Were it not so], the drama of courtship, with its prolonged striv- 

 ings and doubtful success, would bo cut quite short, and the race would degen- 

 erate through the absence of that sexual selection for which the protracted 

 preliminaries of love-making give opportunity. The willy-nilly disposition of 

 the female is as apparent in the butterfly as in the man, and must have been 

 continually favored from the earlies* stages of animal evolution down to the 



