NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.
This publication forms a recent addition to the "Contemporary Science Series," of which the first volume, which appeared in 1889, was written by Geddes and Thomson, and devoted to the question of the "Evolution of Sex"—a biological problem of no mean importance, and one which few zoologists have not in some form, or at some time or other, been forced to consider. There is therefore a somewhat natural sequence in Mr. Ellis's more special contribution to a knowledge of the real differences which divide the human sexes—a study of the deepest importance to the anthropologist and of no little interest to the zoologist. Perhaps no fact in nature has been more universally observed, and as well by the ignorant peasant as by men of the highest culture, that in thought and sentiment men and women are diverse. But, as our author observes, though perhaps with some asperity:—"For the most part questions of sexual difference have been left of recent years to magazine essayists—whose lucubrations are generally too slight and too purely literary to deserve mention—and to philosophers; of the latter, Lotze, Schopenhauer, and Herbert Spencer have perhaps touched the matter with most acuteness, though perhaps in an incomplete and one-sided manner." This, however, can scarcely be said of Darwin's masterly exposition of "Sexual Selection in relation to Man," with which the question in recent years was really focussed.
One of the main contentions of Mr. Ellis is that woman is not "undeveloped man," but rather that "women remain somewhat nearer to children than do men." To understand the gist and real tendency of this argument it is necessary to remember that in animal life there is much deterioration, or departure from the evolutionary ideal in the adult stage. "The infant ape is very much nearer to man than the adult ape." "The ape starts in life
