2 ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE INQUIRY. 



character, based in great measure on organisation, 

 but influenced in no unimportant degree by environ- 

 ment and training, which mainly determine the con- 

 duct of men and women. As Carlyle affirmed, both 

 the best men and women and the worst are found in 

 all varieties of opinion and belief. 



I came slowly to see that the skin of the assaulted 

 women was often clear, delicate, perhaps rosy. Their 

 hair-growth was never heavy or long, and the eyebrows 

 were spare and refined. Their upper spinal curves 

 were so formed as to give a somewhat convex appear- 

 ance to the back and shoulders and a more or less 

 forward pose to the head. This bodily conformation, 

 by the way, is a favourite one with artists, one of whom 

 states that, in a well-formed woman, a plumb-line 

 dropped from the tip of the nose should fall in front 

 of the toes. The friends and neighbours usually let 

 it be known that these unfortunate women whom they 

 brought had sharp tongues in their heads and an 

 unfailing unfailing by repetition supply of irritating 

 topics on which to exercise them. 



A comparatively small number of injured and some- 

 times even dead women were brought in of a wholly 

 different character and different bodily organisation. 

 Their injuries were much more serious. They had 

 been assaulted not by merely provoked men, but by 

 husbands or paramours acting under the impulse of 

 ungovernable and perhaps well-founded jealousy, and 

 with clearly murderous intent. In nearly all cases 

 the assailed women and the assailing men were women 

 and men of but poor intellectual endowment. The 

 women of the smaller class were impassioned, but 

 usually weak pleasure-loving and self-indulgent also. 

 The two classes of women possessed widely different 



