and a
Prostitute." We know no scientific work of equal size--it contains 590
pages--with such a dearth of valid evidence on the theme therein
treated. The statistical matter, from which the bold conclusions are
drawn, is mostly meager. Often a dozen instances suffice the joint
authors to draw the weightiest deductions. The matter that may be
considered the most valuable in the work is, typically enough, furnished
by a woman,--Dr. Tarnowskaja. The influence of social conditions, of
cultural development, is left almost wholly on one side. Everything is
judged exclusively from the physiologico-psychologic view-point, while a
large quantity of ethnographic items of information on various peoples
is woven into the argument, without submitting these items to closer
scrutiny. According to the authors, just as with Schopenhauer, woman is
a grown child, a liar _par excellence_, weak of judgment, fickle in
love, incapable of any deed truly heroic. They claim the inferiority of
woman to man is manifest from a large number of bodily differences.
"Love, with woman, is as a rule nothing but a secondary feature of
maternity,--all the feelings of attachment that bind woman to man arise,
not from sexual impulses, but from the instincts of subjection and
resignation, acquired through habits of conformancy." How these
"instincts" were acquired and "conformed" themselves, the joint authors
fail to inquire into. They would then have had to inquire into the
social position of woman in the course of thousands of years, and would
have been compelled to find that it is that that made her what she now
is. It is true, the joint authors describe partly the enslaved and
dependent position of woman among the several peoples and under the
several periods of civilization; but as Darwinians, with blinkers to
their eyes, they draw all that from physiologic and psychologic, not
from social and economic reasons, which affected in strongest manner the
physiologic and psychologic development of woman.

The joint authors also touch upon the vanity of woman, and set up the
opinion that, among the peoples who stand on a lower stage of
civilization, man is the vain sex, as is noticeable to-day in the New
Hebrides and Madagascar, among the peoples of the Orinoco, and on many
islands of the Polynesian archipelago, as also among a number of African
peoples of the South Sea. With peoples standing on a higher plane,
however, woman is the vain sex. But why and wheref