1397] WOMAN IN EVOLUTION OF HUMAN RACE 91 
suffrage may have a tendency to approximate the ideals, the lives, 
and the habits of women to those of men in these same highly 
civilised races. 
(3) Such approximations in the future, while perfectly natural 
and not in a common sense degenerative, would not belong to the 
progressive stages of the evolution of mankind. Such changes 
would be convergences in structure and character, and, although 
they might lead to what we might now consider as intellectual 
advance, this would not in any way alter the facts that women 
would be tending to become virified * and men to become effeminised, 
and both would have, therefore, entered upon the retrogressive 
period of their evolution. The danger that men may become 
effeminised may be greater than would at first sight seem probable, 
but this might not take place at all or to such a slight extent as not 
to affect seriously the progressive evolution of the race. On the 
other hand, the danger to women cannot be exaggerated nor too 
carefully considered, in view of the fact that advanced women have 
adopted the standards of men, and have not tried as yet to originate 
feminine ideals to guide them in their new careers and thus maintain 
the progressive divergence of the sexes. 
(4) There is a rise of the individual through progressive stages 
of development to the adult and a decline through old age to 
extinction. In the evolution of the stock to which the individual 
belongs there is a similar law, a rise through progressive stages of 
evolution to an acme and a decline through retrogressive stages to 
extinction. These cycles of the ontogeny (the life of the individual) 
and of the phylogeny (the evolution of the race or stock) can be 
illustrated by two diagrams of lines arising from a point, diverging 
to represent the progressive stages and converging to represent the 
retrogressive. The divergences and subsequent convergences are not 
simply physiological analogies, as heretofore supposed, but they occur 
in obvious relations of structures and forms which indicate that one 
law governs the development of the individual and the evolution of 
the stock to which that individual belongs. 
The various characteristics of an organism develop through youth 
to the adult and end in the convergences of old age, which is termed 
the gerontic stage. Species, genera, or genetic stocks of any kind. 
likewise progress from their origin and diverge to an acme, finally 
converging in the phylogerontic period (the gerontic period of the 
phylum). This last word is used because it conveys an accurate 
meaning for which there is no exact equivalent in the English 
* This term enables one to consider the future woman who has acquired manly habits 
and character as tending to become mannish without being necessarily a degenerate 
being either physically or mentally. In point of fact she may be virified and yet be, 
according to the standards of advanced women of to-day, superior in both respects, so 
far as bodily and mental vigour are concerned to the women of the present time. 
