126 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



intelligent than man is not borne out by the investigations 

 of those best qualified to pronounce an opinion on the sub- 

 ject. To assert, as so many do, that woman was created 

 man's intellectual inferior is begging the question. Science 

 can adduce no proof of such a gratuitous statement. Broca, 

 the most eminent of French anthropologists, regarded as 

 an absurdity the attempt to establish a necessary relation 

 between the development of intelligence and the volume 

 and weight of the encephalon. With the ripe knowledge 

 of his mature years he was inclined to believe that the ap- 

 parent difference in intelligence in the two sexes was owing, 

 not to a difference of brain organization, but rather to a 

 difference of education, physical as well as mental, and 

 that, with equal opportunities for intellectual and physical 

 development, the present sexual differences that we have 

 been considering differences which are due not to nature 

 but to the long ages of restraint and subjection under which 

 women have lived would gradually be lessened, and that 

 men and women would eventually approach that equality 

 which characterizes them in the state of nature. 1 



Realizing the impossibility of arriving, by the study of 

 brain sizes and structure, at any satisfactory conclusion 

 respecting the relative intellectual capacities of men and 

 women, seekers after truth cast about for other methods 

 that were free from the errors and fallacies of those which 

 had proved so unreliable. The attempt to base the alleged 

 mental inferiority of woman upon the facial angle of 

 Camper, the metafacial angle of Serres, the craniofacial 

 angle of Huxley, the sphenoidal angle of Welcker, or the 

 nasobasal angle of Virchow had issued in utter failure, and 



*Quand on songe & la difference qui separe de notre temps 

 1 'education intellectuelle de 1'homme de celle de la femme, on se de- 

 mande si ce n 'est pas cette influence qui retrecit le cervaux et le crane 

 feminins, et si, les deux sexes etant livres a leur spontaneite, leur 

 cervaux ne tendraient pas a se ressembler, aussi qu 'il arrive chez les 

 sauvages." Bulletin de la Societe d'Anthropologie, p. 503, Paris, 

 July 3, 1879. 



