The Sexes throughout Nature. By Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Author of "Studies in General Science." Pp. 240. G. P. Putnam's Sons. Price $1.25.
The line of argument upon the woman-question which was opened by Mrs. Blackwell in an article in The Popular Science Monthly on the alleged antagonism between growth and reproduction, and which was subsequently still further pursued in these pages by Dr. Frances Emily White in papers on "Woman's Place in Nature," is carried out in the present volume with considerable elaboration. It is a monograph, written to establish, on scientific grounds, the equality of the sexes throughout Nature. Both Mrs. Blackwell and Miss White are students of science, and recognize that in its later progress, especially in biology and psychology, it has direct and important bearings upon the issues raised in the women's movement. They recognize Darwin and Spencer as representing the most advanced scientific results, but object to the conclusions at which these gentlemen have arrived, on the subject of the relations of the sexes. Mrs. Blackwell's work is therefore not an attempt merely to expound the present state of science, but it aims to controvert conclusions deemed erroneous, and which have weight because emanating from high authorities. Of her book we may say that it is written in a clear and excellent style, contains much interesting information which will be fresh to many readers, and abounds in acute suggestions and ingenious views, while the publishers have got it up in an attractive form.
But, considered as an original scientific argument, we fail to see that Mrs. Blackwell has advanced or altered the position of the question she has taken up. She undertakes to prove that throughout all Nature the sexes are equal. We will not say that this is an impossible task; but if it be attempted in a truly scientific spirit we have no hesitation in saying that even the proximate solution of her problem belongs to the very distant future. For what she proposes to do is nothing less than to reduce the whole organic world, with all its vital and psychical characters, into exact and demonstrable quantitative expression. She puts the problem sharply, saying: "This is a subject for direct scientific investigation. It is a question of pure quantity; of comparing unlike but strictly measurable terms. In time it can be experimentally decided and sol tied by rigid mathematical tests." Accordingly, she reduces the elements of her subject to the form of equations, and, making an analysis of the characters and functions of the sexes in insects, fishes, cetacea, birds, herbivora, carnivora, and man, she aims to establish the equivalence of their relations. Special attributes she admits to be variable, but, taking the totality of attributes and bringing them together as balancing quantities, she maintains that throughout Nature the sexes are strict mathematical equivalents of each other.
Mrs. Blackwell seems to us to be quite oblivious of the difficulties of the task here undertaken. We know how long and painfully even the lower and simpler sciences toiled through their qualitative stages, before they reached the possibility of entering upon their quantitative relations. And we know, too, how the difficulties have thickened in prosecuting these sciences to their higher stages, even where all the effects are capable of being dealt with by direct experiment. But when we pass to the organic sciences these difficulties are immensely heightened. That organic phenomena are governed by quantitative laws is no doubt true, and it is the duty of science to work them out as fast and as far as it can; but, considering the vastness of the work, we can hardly regard it as yet fairly begun. Certain important physiological constants have been determined with some accuracy of general expression. The weight of the parts—skeleton, muscles, and brain—the proportions of chemical constituents, the rates of respiratory change, the statistics of circulation, the balance of assimilation and waste, and the relation of the expenditure of mechanical force to the food consumed, have been arrived at in a general and proximate way, after centuries of labor by the physiologists of all nations. Even to these results it would be wholly inadmissible to apply the term exact. But, when we rise to more complex organic manifestations, to the functions of the nervous system, to feeling and thought, and those pro-
