i88 5 .] 
( 479 ) 
CORRESPONDENCE. 
SIR LYON PLAYFAIR’S PRESIDENTIAL SPEECH. 
In your article on Sir L. Playfair’s Address (p. 6n) you make 
what seems to me a serious omission. The speaker, in his 
recommendations concerning higher education, proposed that 
while colleges for the middle class should give a training pre- 
eminently scientific, those for the youth of the “ upper ten 
thousand ” should still, as now, be mainly classical and literary 
in their teachings. I submit that so long as such an arrange- 
ment prevails Science will never take the rank to which it is 
entitled. It will be contended that if Science is unfit for a pro- 
minent place in the education of the higher classes, it is of course 
something of a second-rate, shabby-genteel character, and in the 
schools intended for the middle classes it will be elbowed out as 
far as possible in favour of “ gerund-grinding.” 
Adrian. 
THE DIFFERENCE OF STATURE AND STRENGTH 
IN THE TWO SEXES. 
A certain Dr. Bebel has been recently contending in a special 
work that “ once upon a time ” the average woman was equal in 
bulk and strength to the average man. Being, however, naturally 
dependent on their husbands during the seasons of gestation 
and laCtation, they gradually decreased in bulk, and in power 
alike of mind and body became less able to provide for them- 
selves, and were ultimately reduced to a state of “ subjection,” 
as it is called in the “ gospel according to John Stuart Mill.” 
This view seems to me utterly out of harmony with the teachings 
of organic Evolution. In all mammalian groups we find the 
males surpassing the females in size and weight, the distinction 
being very marked in the anthropoid apes. If, then, mankind 
were evolved out of any pre-existing mammalian form, there is 
a very strong probability, if not certainty, that from their earliest 
development men were superior to women in stature and 
strength. 
Graduate. 
