n have as large
a brain as any man. It is within my knowledge that a man who had
weighed many human brains, said that the heaviest he knew of, heavier
even than Cuvier's (the heaviest previously recorded,) was that of a
woman. Next, I must observe that the precise relation which exists
between the brain and the intellectual powers is not yet well
understood, but is a subject of great dispute. That there is a very
close relation we cannot doubt. The brain is certainly the material
organ of thought and feeling: and (making abstraction of the great
unsettled controversy respecting the appropriation of different parts
of the brain to different mental faculties) I admit that it would be
an anomaly, and an exception to all we know of the general laws of
life and organization, if the size of the organ were wholly
indifferent to the function; if no accession of power were derived
from the greater magnitude of the instrument. But the exception and
the anomaly would be fully as great if the organ exercised influence
by its magnitude _only_. In all the more delicate operations of
nature--of which those of the animated creation are the most
delicate, and those of the nervous system by far the most delicate of
these--differences in the effect depend as much on differences of
quality in the physical agents, as on their quantity: and if the
quality of an instrument is to be tested by the nicety and delicacy
of the work it can do, the indications point to a greater average
fineness of quality in the brain and nervous system of women than of
men. Dismissing abstract difference of quality, a thing difficult to
verify, the efficiency of an organ is known to depend not solely on
its size but on its activity: and of this we have an approximate
measure in the energy with which the blood circulates through it,
both the stimulus and the reparative force being mainly dependent on
the circulation. It would not be surprising--it is indeed an
hypothesis which accords well with the differences actually observed
between the mental operations of the two sexes--if men on the average
should have the advantage in the size of the brain, and women in
activity of cerebral circulation. The results which conjecture,
founded on analogy, would lead us to expect from this difference of
organization, would correspond to some of those which we most
commonly see. In the first place, the mental operations of men might
be expected to be slower. They would neither be