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Man discusses Him, tries to explain Him, imagines Him, alas! sometimes creates Him; woman loves Him.
The respiratory apparatus of woman is more perfect than that of man. The lungs are situated higher in the chest, elevating, as it were, the situation of the heart, liver, and other organs. Woman is thus not only the conservator of the race, but the depositary of the great seal of the superiority of the human family over the brute creation — and of race over race. Man respires more like the lower animals, by the base of the lungs, woman more by the superior portions. She is in more direct communication with the revivifying atmosphere; drinks, as it were, from the fountain-head of this celestial and mysterious aliment. On this principle many strange phenomena may be explained. It is often remarked how much less women eat than men, even those whose work is almost as laborious. They are often said, jokingly, to "live upon air." Indeed, those nervous beings whom one constantly meets, without muscular force, consuming but little, yet sustaining superhuman exertions, how do they live, if not "upon air?" Frenchmen have something of this type. It has been said: "Give a Frenchman a morsel of bread and a swallow of wine, and he will march and fight to the end of the earth." He "lives upon air."
In the intelligence which can judge and appreciate the productions of genius, woman is without equal. Her leisure and her enthusiastic ardor have always assured her a great influence in these judgments. So the approval of women is sure to become the taste of the public.
Intelligence, then, belongs to women as to men, rather with different qualities than in different proportions. The higher qualities of intelligence, of which we have spoken as peculiar to man, are only the possession of the chosen
