orphoses in all the tissues of his body,
while concentrating every conscious effort of his mind upon equally
delicate processes of thought and will.

The peculiarities that, when coarsely emphasized, serve to distinguish
different species of animals from one another, are repeated in more
subtle gradations, as varieties among the different classes, and even
different individuals of the human race. Here may be found, at least,
faint echoes and distant reminiscences of facts that stand out in bold
relief throughout the animal kingdom. The classification of sex is
certainly one of those that offer an interesting opportunity for such
comparison, especially in regard to the relations existing between the
operations of the ganglionic, and those of the cerebro-spinal system. As
the authors who have asserted the complete subordination of the brain to
the instincts in woman, have thus, perhaps unconsciously, reduced her to
the anatomical level of the crustacea; so those who, like Dr. Clarke,
insist on the incompatibility between cerebral action and the process of
ovulation, imply a predominance of ganglionic activity in women that
must render them the physiological inferiors of the animals or
individuals in whom no such incompatibility exists.

Were such opposition between cerebral and ganglionic functions only
noted when a rhythmical intermittence was introduced into the latter,
and were such rhythm observed only in the phenomena of menstruation, it
might indeed be possible to fix upon women a peculiar mark of
physiological inferiority, almost sufficient to amount to a stigma. But
rhythmical movement is characteristic of all physiological actions--of
the beating of the heart, the secretions of the stomach, the congestion
of the spleen, the circulation of the brain, quite as decidedly as of
the ripening of cells in the ovary. The tidal waves described by
Michelet have become the exclusive theme of his eloquence, mainly
because his attention was not attracted to any but those connected with
the more obvious phenomena of menstruation. But many tidal waves rise
and cross each other in shorter or longer cycles--waves of pulse and of
temperature, of sleep and wakefulness, intermittences of secretion and
excretion. In regard to the latter, it is noticeable that an
intermittent excretion, as of bile or urine, is provided for by a
continuous secretion, and that the same is true of the excretion upon
whose rhythm an erroneously exception