HABITS OF THE QBE AT CRESTED GBEBE. 347 



say no less than that he is in his psj^chology as much a woman 

 as a man ; which is what, for xny part (and vice versa), I am in- 

 clined to believe — though, of course, in ordinary persons, the 

 one or the other portion is, generally, more or less in abeyance. 

 Now it will be admitted — or, at any rate, it seems likely — 

 that the principal differences in the psychology of the sexes 

 have their root in the sexual separation itself, inasmuch as 

 certain main channels of thought and feeling seem by this to be 

 cut off from the one sex or the other, especially from the male 

 one. In the ' Heart of Midlothian,' the old hag, who has once 

 nursed Robertson, says to the thief, Levitt, " And man can never 

 ken what woman feels for the bairn she has held, first, to her 

 bosom"; to which he replies, " To be sure, we have no experi- 

 ence." Were this and many other similar propositions so true 

 as they appear to be, I believe that such man-creators as Homer, 

 Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, &c., would either have left 

 female man alone, as not being content with mere portrait- 

 painting — what we call *' study of character " — or else that their 

 productions in it — due to ulterior motives — would have been as 

 notoriously dummies as they are notoriously not. But if either 

 sex has lying latent within it (by inheritance dating from a long- 

 past ancestry) the whole stock of feelings proper to the other, 

 and if what we call creative genius is, or at any rate involves, the 

 power of recalling and shaping these and other — to the many — 

 practically lost possessions, then that quality of being another 

 sex which a great poet or writer exhibits in his work is less 

 difficult to understand. There being a foundation (the mental 

 equivalent of those structural retainments which both sexes 

 possess) dating from an incalculable antiquity, all the subsequent 

 modifications and developments might conceivably have been 

 added to it, the civilized man or woman receiving respectively the 

 latest and highest touchings (not so extraordinarily high perhaps) 

 of civilized womanhood or manhood, to lie — for the most part 

 undreamt of — in that region of their mentality which has come 

 right down from long-past hermaphrodite forms. Should this 

 appear incredible, I would ask what is the real meaning of the 

 facts which I have here given in regard to these Grebes, and 

 which obviously cannot be explained — (as some other apparent 

 abnormalities of this class observable amongst animals may 



