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curious about him. No. Still, I was curious to see whether this man, who came out equipped with moral ideas of Blackwood's Magazine.

some sort, would come out to the top after all, and how he would set about his work when there."

(To be continued.)

WOMAN'S BRAIN.

The man whose brain is small finds a certain satisfaction in the conviction that a woman's must of necessity be smaller. It is a very ancient arrogance, old as the Aryan housefather and older. We find it in ample development among savages, whose contempt for the female understanding is usually measureless. In proportion as men progress towards civilization, so do they grow out of this crude conceit. But they never divest themselves of it to more than a partial extent. The barbarian, even when he has an intuitive feeling which makes him act on the advice of his womenfolks, always asserts his independence, and scorns to give them more than a crumb of credit for a success which may possibly have originated in their mild suggestions. One of the surest of tests in diagnosing the stage of a people's civilization is the estimation in which the female intellect is held; and he who follows the story of human progress will realize that we are still no more than halfway up the scale, while a half-contemptuous feeling is still by large masses of our population entertained in regard to woman's intellect, and while that feeling is still in some measure suffered to color our legislation.

One has only to keep his eye open a little to see that this fine old crusty prejudice has still a flourishing time in our midst. Observe how the first reader of the morning newspaper deals out the news over the breakfast table

to his wife and daughters. You would fancy he had made the news, or had, by his own private sources of information, gathered it from all ends of the earth. You certainly would never suspect, from their relative attitudes, that any one of the ladies who had been the first to open the paper might have dispensed the news with all that air of omniscience. But let her try it, and learn how unnatural, how pert and forward such behavior would appear to the masculine mind. The whole evolutionary trend of man's history has emphasized this relationship. Man must be the protector, woman the protected; man the elm and woman the ivy; SO must man be the instructor and woman the instructed. Watch how the typical citizen conducts his typical wife through a picture gallery. Both are equally ignorant of art, but, as they go, it is his place to deliver his little impromptu lectures before each canvas which attracts his attention. As the camel to the German, so is the subject matter of these discourses to the self-satisfied discourser. Have we not all seen the average man thus engaged in edifying the weaker intellect? Such a pair were one day observed by a sister of mine to stop before a picture in which a white-robed Psyche was being rowed by a naked Charon across the swirling Styx. "Ah!" said he, and a beam of welcome recognition shone from his face. "This is Lord Ullin's Daughter." She was

deeply interested, and received his further full and elaborate details with a wifely meekness. In such cases we feel that the relation of teacher and pupil is natural, though absurd. If he is gratified and she is satisfied, what harm is there? What need have we to interfere?

None in the world! And yet we see that in this Occidental unrest of ours in these kick-it-all-over times, this antique and touching relationship is being challenged. The time may come when men will feel no pang of resentment at being ordered by the female physician to put out their tongues; when their little weaknesses may be sarcastically dealt with from the pulpit by feminine preachers just as loftily as the little foibles of the sex are now dealt with by curates and other godly persons. Men, indeed, may yet have to stifle their rebellious pride and obey the laws that women have made, or helped to make, to bind them!

All such changes will imply that woman is being granted a full equality of status--a concession that will most certainly grow out of the increasing belief in the quality of her intellect. For every year seems to show with increasing conclusiveness that, whatever be the ultimate decision in regard to the occurrence of genius, there is in the great mass of cases a practical equality in the male and female minds. At the same time the conviction has grown secure that the mind is a function of the brain and is conditioned by it, so that, if other things be equal, the more brain there is the more mind there must be. It therefore becomes of interest to know what physiology has to say in reference to the relative sizes of the male and the female brain. Only· last year, two public men in England, well known, though not of first-class standing, gave it as their reason for voting against a certain citizen claim

on behalf of women, that their brains are smaller than men's. Was that merely a popular prejudice, or was there some scientific basis in it? Of course it is not conceivable that they referred to merely absolute size. That would be too childish, for every boy could understand that, naturally, as the smaller animal, woman would have the smaller brain, while it would be quite impossible that, all the same, her brain endowment might, in proportion, be equal, or even ampler than man's. Dr. Boyd, who, at St. Marylebone Hospital, weighed the brains of 652 men and 715 women, supplies us with figures from which we can calculate that the average man has 10 per cent. more brain weight than the average woman. Vierordt's figures from 152 men and 172 women give the average man an advantage of 12 per cent.

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But these are absolute measurements, and therefore form no test of intelligence. Else would the whale, the elephant and the dolphin, with their huge brains, be all the more intelligent than man. But if it be objected that this comparison is sophistical on account of disparity in quality, then I readily make the comparison within the human race itself. Tall men have, the average, bigger brains than short ones; yet they are not more able. No one has detected any tendency for the tall undergraduates to gather at the top of the honor list or for the short ones to gravitate towards the bottom. If the reader takes down at random from his bookshelves the biographies of a hundred celebrated men, and notes their heights, where such important trifles are given, he will find that the average will come out somewhere between 5 feet 6 inches and 5 feet 7 inches, while the general average of all the population in England is 5 feet 6.3 inches, while in France it is 5 feet 6.1 inches.

It is plain, then, that the big man de

rives no advantage in the way of intellect from the bigness of his brain, and that man, in so far as his larger brain is due to his larger body, enjoys no advantage in capacity over woman. The comparison must evidently be one of proportion, and yet the difficult question arises, What is to be the basis of that proportion? Occasional efforts have in the last forty years been made by physiologists to settle this point, but there is none yet that is satisfactory. The most obvious and most usual is to compare the brain weight with the body weight. If this be done, woman has proportionally a larger brain than man, for Boyd's figures show that she has .50 ounce of brain for every pound of weight in her body, while man has only .47 ounce. Here she has an advantage of 6 per cent. Bischoff's figures, gathered in Bonn from 526 men and 332 women, give to the feminine brain exactly the same advantage of 6 per cent., and those of Vierordt, Parchappe and others lead to closely approximate results.

Is the ignominious conclusion then to be swallowed and digested that, after all, instead of being inferior, woman is more richly endowed with brain than man? Morphology comes to the rescue by showing that, in proportion to its body weight, the smaller animal has always the larger brain. A cat has much more than a tiger; a mouse three times as much as a rat; a terrier six times as much as a Newfoundland; a baby has, in proportion to its weight, five times as much brain as his father; while a little man is, on the average, more richly provided than a tall one. Simple comparison of brain weight with body weight is, therefore, quite inadmissible. For which relief the male sex owes its thanks.

We might compare the weight of the brain with the height of the body. In that case man has an advantage.

Boyd's figures show that he has .73 ounce of brain for every inch in his height, while woman has only .70. This gives him an excess of 4 per cent. Broca's figures, gathered in Paris, give by this method an excess of 61⁄2 per cent. to the male brain. No very apparent reason can be adduced why this mode of comparison should have a special validity.

Manouvrier proposed to compare the weight of the brain with that of the thigh bone. His work is ingenious and fantastic, but from the outset it seems divorced from common-sense, and after careful examination it fails to bring any share of conviction. The late Professor Marshall's system also is eccentric. It is too elaborate for brief exposition, and though rather specious at first, it fails to stand any serious test.

It is well known that the whole of our psychic activity finds its organ in the thin outer layer or cortex of the brain. Its amount would therefore seem much more likely to be proportional to the surface of the brain than to its weight. On every square inch there are some 10 millions of those neurons which are the instruments of mental energy. A neuron consists of a cell with a long cylinder axis passing downward like a root, while a dendritic process grows upwards. Consciousness depends, in a way whose details are as yet far from settled, on the contact and retraction of soft, budlike knobs on these branching processes, and brain activity depends primarily on the number of these neurons. But these grow upon the brain surface just as a crop of wheat grows on a field's surface. The analogy, however, is to be pressed no further than this, that just as the number of wheat plants will in no way depend on the weight of earth in the field, but only on the surface that lies exposed to sun and air, so the brain's activity

will have no relation with its weight but only with the surface which it offers for the growth of neurons.

There seems some reason, therefore, to suspect that the comparison we seek ought to be found in consideration of the surface rather than of the weight of the brain. In examination of this idea, I have for the last six years weighed from time to time the brains of large numbers of fish and birds, and, assuming that on the average the brains of specimens of the same species will be symmetrical, I calculated out the surfaces of each. On dealing with the mass of figures by means of a simple, mathematical analysis, I found that, in the case of fish, the surface of the brain is proportional to the length of the individual. For birds, however, the law, whatever it may be, grows more complicated, and for mammals, as we rise in the scale, so does the size of the brain grow less and less dependent on the size of the animal. A mastiff will be thirty times as heavy as a spaniel, yet its brain will be only twice as heavy. Take a big man and a little one. The former may have an excess of 120 per cent. in body weight, yet on the average his excess of brain weight will be less than 5 per cent. In the higher orders it would seem as if each species had its typical size of brain, from which the deviations caused by variations in body weight are comparatively slight. The law of the relation between the two promises to be of extreme complication, and its discovery, in all probability, lies a generation or two in the future.

But, for the subject now in hand, that law, though it would give a wider range and greater cogency to the argument, is not really necessary. For when all available figures representing the brain weights of some 4,000 men and women are plotted out in diagrammatic form, it is seen that just as

there is a brain weight that is typical of the species and only slightly disturbed by variations in size of body, so there is a brain weight that is typical of sex also, the female being in a definite measure short of the male. The line which denotes the increase of male brains with body weight rises very gradually. So does the corresponding line for female brains; but the two are parallel and yet apart, so that the brain of the average tall woman scarcely equals in weight or surface the brain of the average short

man.

Without diagrams it may be hard for the reader to realize the argument, but fortunately it may be put in another form, which is of no general scientific interest, but is perfectly valid for this one point. We may adopt the common-sense method, that is to say, of ceasing to make proportional comparisons when the form of the proportion is unknown, and we may simply take men and women of the same weight for the purpose of making an absolute comparison. It is easy to find a hundred men a little below the medium size, and a hundred women a little above the medium of women. By a proper choice we may have them so arranged that the average height or weight of the one group may be equal to the height or weight of the other. Then it is to be presumed, if women are as well equipped as men in respect of the size of their brains, the average brain weight of the one group ought to be equal to the average of the other.

Whatever be the size we choose for comparison, it is never So. The woman's brain is always less than the man's. Whether the observations be made in England, France or Germany, the results are quite unaffected. From Boyd's figures we can pick out 102 men and 113 women between 64 and 66 inches high, averaging close on

65 inches for each group. But the brains of the men average 46.9 ounces, while those of the women are only 41.9, which gives the men an advantage of 12 per cent. There are 21 small men whose height averages 62 inches, and there are 135 women of the same height. The brains of the men weigh 45.6 ounces, those of the women only 42.9 ounces. Here the men have an advantage of 6.3 per cent. From the figures which Broca gathered in Paris, we may select 54 men and 23 women whose heights were about 1.61 metre, the average of the women, however, being nearly half an inch more than that of the men, yet their brains were less by 9 per cent. than the men's, the weights being 1,218 grammes for the females and 1,329 for the males.

It makes no difference if, instead of taking equal heights, we take equal body weights. Bischoff's figures, gathered at Bonn, will give us the data. They are set forth in groups according to weight. There are 91 men and 116 women whose bodies were between 30 and 39 kilogrammes. The brains of the men weighed 1,348 grammes, and those of the women 1,206; which gives the men an excess of 11 per cent. There were 206 men and 123 women whose body weights lay between 40 and 49 kilogrammes. The brains of the men averaged 1,362 grammes, those of the women only 1,215. the men have the advantage by 12 per cent. Between 50 and 59 kilogrammes there were 148 men and 50 women. The men's brains averaged 1,370 grammes, the women's only 1,245. The excess is 10 per cent. in favor of the men. However or wherever we make the inquiry, it is always seen that when men and women are of equal height or equal weight, the men have something like 10 per cent. more brains than the women.

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sumable influence of quality. But there are no facts to be procured in reference to quality, except such as arise out of the practical experience of every-day life. It is said that the female cortex is thinner than the male, but only in proportion to general dimensions. No observer, so far as I have learnt, has shown or even suggested that sex makes any difference in the number, development or vital energy of those neurons or brain elements which, to the number of a couple of thousand millions, make the physical basis of mind. But, of course, it is fair to remember that this department of science is yet in its utter infancy, the work of Golgi in Italy, and of Ramon y Cajal in Spain, being only some six or seven years old. Histologists will no doubt at some future time discover in brain differences the physiological basis for the undoubted differences between the feminine and the masculine character. But not even the remotest approach to that sort of work has yet been made.

The question of relative quality is, therefore, one that has still to be left in the region of mere speculation. All we can say at present is that, in regard to quantity, man has a clear advantage. History seems to tell us that in general brain capacity, which must be dependent on both, man has had an equal, or even greater, advantage. Part of this is no doubt real; but a part has certainly been only apparent, and due to the social obstacles which have always impeded the aspirations of the intellectual woman. While man has had the mastery, and has likewise had an overweening sense of his own superior talents, a policy of repression has always been pursued in regard to woman. The world at large has entertained the feeling now prevalent in such countries as Siam, that education is for boys, while girls have no minds to educate. No argument, therefore,

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