SEXUAL CEREBRATION. 297 



a capacity to love in woman's psychical nature, and its greater power 

 to impress itself profoundly upon the deliberate acts of her life over 

 that of man. Madame de Stael truly said that "love is the history of 

 woman's life ; it is an episode in man's." 



Love defeated in the attainment of its object becomes in man an 

 incident to be forgotten, or to be remembered with impatience. A 

 defeated love with woman is too often a defeat of her intellectual life. 

 An emotion, the misdirection or disappointment of which is capable 

 of inducing a large per centum of insane in one sex over the other, 

 must surely differ in degree and kind. Certainly we must credit this 

 excess on the part of women with an important physical factor, aside 

 from that of sex proper being of a less hardy development than man 

 but these physical peculiarities permit sex to assert its most potent 

 psychical effect to the degree of shaping the actions or destiny of 

 woman. It will suffice, to illustrate the fact referred to, to take the 

 figures from the report of two asylums for the insane the Pennsyl- 

 vania Hospital for the Insane, and the Michigan Asylum. Of 141 in- 

 sane men and women received into these institutions, whose supposed 

 cause of insanity could be traced to disappointed affections, 84 were 

 women, and 57 were men. These figures are taken from an excess of 

 454 male over female inmates. Now, the figures, as we gather them 

 from asylum reports, show that women are no more prone to insanity 

 than men. It is natural to conclude that a specific cause leading to 

 this excess of insanity in one sex over the other exists with greater 

 force in one than the other, and not that one sex is less able to bear 

 the operation of the specific cause. 



There are many well-known facts in physiology, some of them 

 brought out with remarkable force during the employment of anses- 

 thetics, other facts obtained from a state of organic disease, and others 

 from functional derangements, which tend to prove the sexual origin 

 of love, but which would be out of place in a paper of this character. 

 But there is really no doubt expressed by modern writers on jDhysiolo- 

 gy or psychology that this emotion is due to a sexual origin. Proof, 

 such as I have advanced, becomes necessary from the popular scope 

 of this paper, and that I have grouped a series of mental acts, and ap- 

 plied to them the name of sexual cerebration. 



I offer, in conclusion, some general facts tending to define a funda- 

 mental difference in the mental operations of men and women. M. 

 Quetelet has shown that the propensity to crime existing in a mass of 

 people bears a mathematical ratio, both as to its degree and the sex 

 of the pei'petrators, to the total of population year by year. The cer- 

 tainty of this ratio is the result of law, which has its origin in the forces 

 which cement together a mass of men under the name of society. 

 Now, the fixed ratio existing between men and women of the same 

 community, as to the nature and extent of the commission of crime, 

 must be the product of the mental and physical peculiarities of sex. 



