the old conclusions
may be urged with even greater force than before, because apparently
based exclusively upon such cool and impartial investigation.

The issue is certainly serious. From all sides surges testimony to the
importance of physical conditions as the basis of mental and social
life. According to many, it is by the absence of a few grains of iodine
from the water of drinking fountains, that the people of the Alps are
turned into _cretins_. According to others, it is by the presence of a
few grains of ergot in the bread, that the people of Tuscany lose their
limbs in gangrene. Endemics of abortion depend on the impalpable vapors
that arise from the quicksilver mines of Spain. So delicately poised are
the forces of life, that an apparent trifle suffices to entirely turn
the scale. It is therefore not _a priori_ improbable, that the marked
peculiarities of physical organization that distinguish the female sex,
should determine a radically different mode of mental existence, and
exact radically different conditions of mental activity.

The whole question, however, is not one of probability or of
possibility, but of fact. Hence, the last persons capable of judging in
the matter, are those who have been vividly impressed with those
circumstances that furnish, or may be made to furnish, food for the
imagination. Of these, Michelet is perhaps the type, but certainly many
of the reviewers who have been occupied with Dr. Clarke's book, must be
ranked in the same class. Would it be disrespectful to Dr. Clarke's far
better informed judgment and technical knowledge to suggest, that he
himself does not seem to be perfectly free from the influence of the
glamour that invests the study of physiological peculiarities in women,
wherever these can be made to tell upon any social or moral relations?
Dr. Clarke does not indeed affirm, with Michelet, that women are
essentially diseased. "_La femme est une malade._" Where Michelet leaves
to the healthiest women but a single week of every month for normal
existence, Dr. Clarke believes that one week out of the month alone
requires any special precautions, and that, with decent care at this
time, "an immense amount of work" can be accomplished in the remainder.
He is careful to say, and even to repeat, that the intellectual labor to
which such disastrous results are attributed, is not in itself
incompatible with the nature of the woman, nor, even when improperly
pursued, can it be