view, not unsupported by the belief of ages, that woman is even more
complex in constitution than man, and therefore no less liable to vary
within wide limits. On what one may term organic analysis, comparable to
the chemist's analysis of a compound, woman may be found to be more
complex, composed of even more numerous and more various elementary
atoms, so to say, than man.

And if these new observations upon the nature of femaleness were not
enough to warn the writer who should rashly propose, after the fashion
of the unwise, who on every hand lay down the law on this matter, to
state once and for all exactly what, and what only, every woman should
be, we find that another long-held belief as to the relative variety of
men and women has lately been found baseless. It was long held, and is
still generally believed--in consequence of that universal confusion
between the effects of nature and of nurture to which we have already
referred--that women are less variable than men, that they vary within
much narrower limits, and that the bias towards the typical, or mean, or
average, is markedly greater in the case of women than of men. A vast
amount of idle evidence is quoted in favour of a proposition which seems
to have some _a priori_ plausibility. It is said--of course, without any
allusion to nurture, education, environment, opportunity--that such
extreme variations as we call genius are much commoner amongst men than
women: and then that the male sex also furnishes an undue proportion of
the insane--as if there were no unequal incidence of alcohol and
syphilis, the great factors of insanity, upon the two sexes.
Nevertheless, observant members of either sex will either contradict one
another on this point according to their particular opportunities, or
will, on further inquiry, agree that women vary surely no less generally
than men, at any rate within considerable limits, whatever may be the
facts of colossal genius. Indeed, we begin to perceive that differences
in external appearance, which no one supposes to be less general among
women than among men, merely reflect internal differences; and that, as
our faces differ, so do ourselves, every individual of either sex being,
in fact, not merely a peculiar variety, but the solitary example of that
variety--in short, unique. The analysis of the individual now being made
by experimental biology lends abundant support to this view of the
higher forms of life--the more abundan