120 THOSE OTHER ANIMALS. 



to him absolutely unaccountable. In many respects women 

 are to the full as brave and courageous as men. In the 

 horrors of a shipwreck, in the dangers of a siege, in times 

 of great peril, such as the Indian Mutiny, women have, 

 over and over again, showed themselves to be at least equal 

 to men in bravery, in calmness, and in endurance. But the 

 woman who would, pale but firm, face a lion in an arena, 

 will fly in terror from a mouse ; and many a moment of 

 sweet revenge and triumph has been felt by men with 

 spouses of strong minds and shrewish tongues, when they 

 have seen them paralysed with terror by a tiny mouse. 



History records no example of a mouse attacking a man, 

 and, when tamed, they never use their teeth. They have 

 no powers of scratching ; they cannot assume a threatening 

 aspect ; they neither show their teeth, growl, nor spit ; 

 they cannot stick up their furs as can a cat ; they are, 

 in fact, absolutely without means of aggression, and yet 

 women quail before them. Man has wearied himself with 

 conjectures as to this phenomenon. The Greek and Roman 

 philosophers were posed by it, and the saying, parturiunt 

 monies, nascitur ridiculus mus, which has ignorantly been sup- 

 posed to signify that a small matter was produced after great 

 labour, has, when critically examined, an entirely different 

 and far more profound meaning. The philosopher clearly 

 desired to signify that it needed the labour of mountains to 

 produce a creature capable of awing the female mind. In 

 the Greek fable of the Lion and the Mouse, the same feeling 

 of respect and appreciation for the smaller animal is clearly 

 shown. Some have gone so far as to trace back the enmity 

 between the female and the mouse to the earliest times, 

 and the argument has been advanced that the word trans- 



