three pounds and
eight ounces. Woman's brain weighs, on an average, two pounds and four
ounces. The female intellect is impregnated with the qualities of her
sensitive nature. It acts rather through a channel of electricity than
of reasoning. Its perceptions of truth come, as it were, by intuition.
It is under the influence of the heart, that has deep and unfathomable
wells of feeling; and truth is felt in every pulse, rather than
reasoned out and demonstrated. You cannot offend a woman so quick, in
any way, as to ask her why she wishes to do thus, or why she reaches
such a conclusion. Her reply is, invariably, "'_Cause!_" And that is
about all she knows about it; and yet woe be to the man who ignores
her intuitions, or treats with disdain her advice. Woman reads
character quicker and better than man. Her policy lies in her heart.
She feels rather than reasons. Man reasons rather than feels. Hence
she is a helpmeet. She fills a lack, and supplies a want.

In her the imagination and fancy have such a lively play, that the
homeliest principles assume forms of beauty. In intellectual pursuits
she is destined to excel by her fine sensibilities, her nice
observations, and exquisite tastes, while man is appointed to
investigate the laws of abstruse sciences, and perform in literature
and art the bolder flights of genius. She may surpass him in
representing life and manners, and in the composition of letters,
memoirs, and moral tales, in descriptive poetry, and in certain styles
of music and painting, and even in sculpture. But she will never write
an Iliad or a Paradise Lost, or tragedies like those of Aeschylus. She
will never rival Demosthenes in producing a political oration, nor
a massive philosophic history like Thucydides. She will not paint a
Madonna like Raphael, nor chisel an Apollo Belvedere. The logic of
Aristotle, the polemics of Augustine, the prodigious onsets of a
Luther, the Institutes of a Calvin, the Novum Organum of Bacon, the
Principia of Newton, the Cosmos of Humboldt--the like of these she
will never achieve, nor is it desirable that she should.

Women seldom invent. There are all manner of inventions, often
hundreds of applications in a single day, for patents at the Patent
Office, yet among them there are no female applicants. Woman cannot
compete with man in a long course of mental labor. The female mind is
rather quiet and timid than fiery and driving. It admires rather than
covets the great explo