, it does not lie in any anatomical or
physiological advantage. The essential feminine machine is no better
than the essential masculine machine; both are monuments to the
maladroitness of a much over-praised Creator. Women, it would seem,
actually have smaller brains than men, though perhaps not in proportion
to weight. Their nervous responses, if anything, are a bit duller than
those of men; their muscular coordinations are surely no prompter. One
finds quite as many obvious botches among them; they have as many bodily
blemishes; they are infested by the same microscopic parasites; their
senses are as obtuse; their ears stand out as absurdly. Even assuming
that their special malaises are wholly offset by the effects of
alcoholism in the male, they suffer patently from the same adenoids,
gastritis, cholelithiasis, nephritis, tuberculosis, carcinoma, arthritis
and so on--in short, from the same disturbances of colloidal equilibrium
that produce religion, delusions of grandeur, democracy, pyaemia, night
sweats, the yearning to save humanity, and all other such distempers in
men. They have, at bottom, the same weaknesses and appetites. They react
in substantially the same way to all chemical and mechanical agents.
A dose of hydrocyanic acid, administered per ora to the most sagacious
woman imaginable, affects her just as swiftly and just as deleteriously
as it affects a tragedian, a crossing-sweeper, or an ambassador to the
Court of St. James. And once a bottle of Cte Rtie or Scharlachberger
is in her, even the least emotional woman shows the same complex of
sentimentalities that a man shows, and is as maudlin and idiotic as he
is.

Nay; the superior acumen and self-possession of women is not inherent
in any peculiarity of their constitutions, and above all, not in any
advantage of a purely physical character. Its springs are rather to
be sought in a physical disadvantage--that is, in the mechanical
inferiority of their frames, their relative lack of tractive capacity,
their deficiency as brute engines. That deficiency, as every one knows,
is partly a derricked heritage from those females of the Pongo pygmaeus
who were their probable fore-runners in the world; the same thing is to
be observed in the females of almost all other species of mammals. But
it is also partly due to the effects of use under civilization, and,
above all, to what evolutionists call sexual selection. In other words,
women were already measurably w