292 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



shaping the mental character of the sexes. Men reduced to a con- 

 dition of eunuchism afford a wonderful contrast to men in the normal 

 condition. It is upon the cerebrum and on its function of cerebration 

 that some of its most marked effects are to be observed. He ceases 

 to be fit for war, and is of service only in the pursuits of peace. He 

 is no longer capable of daring to assert his rights, and, of all beings, 

 is a fit subject for a slave. Not only is he made a coward, but the 

 moral senses are weakened, and he maybe safely delegated to execute 

 the cruelty of others. It does not seem, then, to be any thing but a 

 legitimate deduction that this radical difference, intellectually, be- 

 tween the normal man and eunuchism is the participation of the 

 brain in the generic cycle, and one phase of sexual cerebration. 



Through all the females of the mammalia, there exists a feeling 

 toward their young called the maternal mstinct. There is no neces- 

 sity here of going into the question of instinct among animals, as to 

 whether it partakes of the nature of an intellectual process. What- 

 ever be its nature, it is evidently a part of generation, and as such is 

 eminently sexual in its origin. In dealing with this feeling in the 

 human female, although it may have a rudimentary intellectual source, 

 yet it is lifted above the level of instinctive feeling, and becomes a part 

 of her emotional nature. " The intimate and essential relation of emo- 

 tions to the ideas, which they equal in number and variety, is suffi- 

 cient to prove that the law of progress from the general and simple 

 to the special and complex prevails in their development " (Mauds- 

 ley). Thus it is that an instinctive feeling in lower animals, without 

 which the reproductive faculty would be totally defeated, becomes 

 the maternal emotion in its simplest form in the human being ; and, 

 by carrying on this evolution from the simple to the complex, pro- 

 duces a complete modification of the psychical tone. Here, also, we 

 may gain a clearer insight into the nature of the maternal feeling by 

 contrasting it with the paternal feeling.* This emotion is a state of 

 the mind which obtains the conditions of its existence from the same 

 physical faculty that of reproduction ; and although it is closely re- 

 lated to the expression of the maternal feeling in the more developed 

 state of the emotion, yet, in its fundamental form, it differs widely. 



Thus, among the male of the mammalia in which it is not entirely 

 absent, it mostly assumes the form of abstaining from injury, while in 

 the female of the same species it exists as a protecting and maintain- 

 ing instinct. 



In the human race, the same emotion receives a shadow cast from 

 its primal origin in animals. In the human female, in the child-bear- 

 ing period, it exists as a love, active or passive, for all children ; while 

 in men, dui'ing the more active period of manhood, it exists as a gentle 

 tolerance of children, until called out in its active form by his own 



^ The word " feeling " is here used, not in its idiomatic sense, but as a state of con- 

 sciousness. 



