ery one will admit that strenuous spasmodic bursts
of activity characterize men, especially in youth, and among the
less civilized races; while patient continuance, with less violent
expenditure of energy, is as generally associated with the work of
women."

We must shortly proceed to study the origin and determination of sex,
and more especially of femaleness, in the individual, and here we shall
be entirely concerned with the new knowledge commonly called Mendelism,
to which there is no allusion in our authors' pages. Meanwhile it must
be insisted that the reader who will either read their pages for a
survey of the evidence in detail, or who will for a moment consider the
evident necessities imposed by the facts of parenthood, cannot possibly
fail to satisfy himself that the main contention, as stated in the
foregoing quotations, is correct. A further point of the greatest
importance to us requires to be made.

It is that, owing to profound but intelligible causes, the contrast
which necessarily obtains between the sexes in respect of their vital
expenditure is most marked in the case of our own species. It is one of
the conditions of progress that the young of the higher species make
more demands upon their mothers than do the young of humbler forms. In
other words, progress in the world of life has always leant upon and
been conditioned by motherhood. Thus, as one has so frequently asserted
in reference to the modern campaign against infant mortality, the young
of the human species are nurtured within the sacred person--the
_therefore_ sacred person--of the mother for a longer period in
proportion to the body weight than in the case of any other species; and
the natural period of maternal feeding is also the longest known. On the
other hand, the physical demands made by parenthood upon the male sex
are no greater in our case than in that of lower forms; though upon the
psychical plane the great fact of increasing paternal care in the right
line of progress may never be forgotten. But thus it follows that the
law of conservation, asserting that what is spent for self cannot be
kept for the race, and that if the demands of the future are to be met
the present must be subordinated, not merely applies to woman, but
applies to her in unique degree. There are grounds, also, for believing
that what is demonstrably and obviously true on the physical plane has
its counterpart in the psychical plane; and