THE BRAINS OF MEN AND WOMEN.
ONE of the chief features of the British Association meeting at Toronto was the paper of Sir William Turner on the relative capacity of the brain of man and woman. Since Sir William Turner has been, we believe, a rather strong opponent of the admission of women on equal terms with men in the University, some bias may possibly have crept into the essay which he read, but in the main the facts are incontestable. Men are born into the world with heavier brains than women, and the relative difference con- tinues throughout life. We must, of course, take men and women of the same classes as well as races, so that the comparison may be quite fair. It would be absurd to compare the brain of a highly cultivated Englishman with that of a negro woman ; and it would not be just to compare the brain of the same man with the brain of a woman of the poorest labouring class in East London or Southern England. Comparison must be in pan i materia. Nor must we forget the fact of exceptional men and women. George Eliot's head appeared to indicate a mass of brain greater than that of the average man, and the same phenomenon may be inferred from por- traits of the celebrated women rulers of the world, Catherine of Russia, Christina of Sweden, and some others. Here and there, in a crowded theatre, church, or concert- room, one sees a few women with remarkable heads, the forehead prominent, the crown high, the back of the skull well developed,—everything connoting a very considerable brain, as large as, or even larger than, that of the average man. But in the main the rule holds good; the brain of man weighs more than that of woman.
Has this anatomical fact any bearing on the eternal Woman question, or is it devoid of special significance ? The "new woman" claims that she can compete successfully with man in his own field of work, and we are constantly reading of some woman lawyer, or auctioneer, or professor whose existence is held to be sufficient answer to those old-fashioned people who think that, in spite of all the "new women" and "revolting daughters," woman has still a sphere that is her own to which she should devote herself, and that man has hie sphere into which it is not desirable that women should penetrate. It is not a question of placing legal restrictions in the way of feminine action; for many of those who are firmly convinced that women will fail in trying to do men's tasks, are also quite willing that they should try if they wish to. The question is, Can they succeed P Or has Nature placed any real barrier in the way, thus intimating that she will not be trifled with P And do the facts adduced by Sir William Turner bear on this fundamental fact of sex- difference ? We have no doubt as to the veto exercised by Nature, but the facts are somewhat complex, and it is well to admit at once all that can be said against our view. Weight is not the sole quality of importance in the brain ; there are also the factors of fineness of texture, of variety and direction of convolutions, of the parts of the brain which are most developed. Cavier's brain is generally taken as an instance of the greatest and most powerful ever weighed and analysed. It weighed, we think, 64 oz., the average male brain being under 50 oz., and the convolutions were remarkable. We may say that one who marshalled vast armies of facts and brought them into related order by his powerful intellect must have possessed a big and heavy brain as an organ for so great a mind. But Grote, the historian, also marshalled facts, and brought them into harmonious order ; and he possessed a brain scarcely larger than that of the average woman. There. fore, while the presumption is in favour of weight, that cannot be the sole determining factor. A great domed head, like that of Shakespeare, seems favourable to display of intellect. But Darwin had a receding forehead, and the busts of many of the great thinkers of antiquity—notably Plato— do not give us the domed head. When we look at the portrait or bust of Scott we are struck by the immense height of the crown, and we are apt to say that it denotes imagination; but there are scores of poets and romancers who show us little or nothing of this striking fact. The truth is, we have not yet reached any absolute law connecting brain with intellect. Many factors have to be considered, and all that we can say is that, on the whole, a man with a big brain is likely to be more powerful than a man with a small one, and that the average male brain is weightier than is the average brain of woman.
Now the brain is not only the organ of mind in an exclusive sense of the word, but it is the organ of volition, it is the organ which regulates and co-ordinates action. In a general way it is believed that the grey matter is the special vehicle of thought, while the cerebellum is the organ which controls the bodily, and more especially the nervous, mani- festations. This is a rough generalisation from a great number of observed instances. We say that a man with a big neck, denoting an excessive cerebellum, will probably be a man of great will power, of immense but regulated nervous energy. Such were some of the Roman Emperors, such was Napoleon, such in our time is Bismarck. It is true that many men of inferior intellect show the same phenomenon, but they are generally men of power of some kind, if it is only the power of a determined burglar. But turn to women, and this development is scarcely to be seen, and it is manifest that women would lose much of their charm if it were. The curve of a woman's neck is one of her attractive features ; it would disappear with a powerful cerebellum. But it is the part of the brain which gives staying power, which enables men both to will and to execute their will, which appears to enable them to sustain energy and to put it forth with redoubled -vigour even when the general vital powers are lowered by prolonged work. It is notorious that women are deficient here, that a woman breaks down far oftener, that she fails in great designs, that her energy, while often striking, is not sustained, that her nervous power is weaker than that of man. We are told sometimes that physical exercise will change all this, we are pointed to the tall, shapely, handsome women, so many of whom one's eye gladly lights upon, we are reminded of the Amazons, and of tribes where women fight as well as men. It is true that many women of leisure have in our time developed a fine physique, but so have the men. We are not, be it again hinted, to compare a young woman of the upper classes who is used to various forma of sport from her earliest days—the kind of woman whom Taine admired in Rotten Row—with the youth who stands behind a counter all day long ; we must compare her with the young men of her class, with her brothers or her lover. Can she plan and execute and endure as well as they ? We should say not. Here is one test which disposes, we think, of the notion of the similarity of nervous and executive power. The "new woman," with all her claims to compete with man, does not ask to go into the Army or Navy, to direct scientific expeditions, to investigate mines, to do the work of our explorers, our great commanders, our managers of mills, factories, banks. We have, it is true, heard of one or two women dabbling on the Stock Exchange; but how many women have the nerve or sustained energy needed for pro- longed calculations or audacious coups? We may one day see the miracle of a woman war correspondent of a great newspaper, but every one would at once say that it was a break in the normal coarse of things. We do not, of course, hold that singular materialist view of Cabanis, that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. But we see that a certain type of brain does, as a matter of fact, go with
a certain bodily organisation, and that the absence in woman of the powerful baeal brain so widely observed in man con- notes in her a comparative absence of those qualities which the presence of this part of the brain indicates in man.
The weightier brain would seem also to indicate, a priori, the greater intellectual power, and this, too, is borne out by undoubted facts. Women, it has often been said, have yet to produce their Newton, their Dante, their Aristotle, their Pascal, their Goethe. The assertion is very feebly met by the contention that women's education has been for centuries neglected. It was not education which enabled Pascal as a child to see his way through problems which not one man in a thousand can understand after prolonged mental drill. It was not education which gave the race its great men poets. "They lisped in numbers for the numbers came." But where are their feminine equals ? We will, however, take an art in which women have enjoyed far more training than men,—the art of music. There are some excellent women pianists and violinists ; but where are the female Bache, Beethovene, Mozarts, and Wagners ? Nature only can explain the absence of great women composers as of the feminine compeers of Titian and Raphael, the technique of whose art seems peculiarly fitted to women. Nature tells us that she cannot form the matrix out of which commanding intel- lectual geniuses of the female sex would proceed. Why this is so we may partly guess, but cannot wholly know. We see that Nature has divided the world into sexes for her own purposes, and that to each sex peculiar functions are assigned. We see that the physiological functions of woman necessitate a different anatomy from that of man, and we infer that these functions and this structure preclude, speaking generally, the kind of effort which we call supreme genius, as also that kind of effort which we call sustained executive power. While women are not so far differentiated from men that they cannot enter with pleasure into men's works, and, often in a great measure, share in their production, it remains a fact that it is man's particular organisation which is alone capable either of the highest manifestations of genius, or the most sustained exhibition of energy. Whether it will always be so, we do not know, for we cannot peer into the future. It is sufficient that it not only is so now, but that it always has been so, and that science does give us some good grounds for believing that the fact is deeply rooted in the very structure of sex.
What we do not wish any one to infer from this is any dogma of sexual inequality. It is not true to say that the sexes are unequal, but it is true to say that they are different, and that the Creator designed that each should be com- plementary to the other. But, it will be asked, if women are less in original intellect and in active power, in
what do they excel The answer of the heart and imagination of Christendom is that the gift of Love is supremely committed to their care. The physiological function of nutrition which women fulfil (and which must militate against their capacity for either an active or a purely intellectual life), has its corresponding spiritual power which may be developed from the mere physical function. As woman nourishes her babe from her own body, so does she nourish the world by love. Hence the preaching of the religion of love has been contemporaneous with the rise of woman to a stature higher than in the ancient world. When Dante made of his earthly lover, Beatrice, an idealised medium for raising him nearer to the source of all things, which in the closing canto of the "Paradiso" he sees to be love incarnating itself in the universe, he gave us a profound in- sight into the true power of the woman nature. Goethe saw the same truth, and expressed it in his moig-weibliche. To exercise this supreme power, is it not greater than even writing a Faust or a Hamlet, not to speak of hustling male votere at a polling-booth? This is the eternal power of woman.
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