With regard to autopsies, you tell me that you are awaiting my promised work, in order to make mine. It would be doubtless a great honor to be stretched on your dissecting table in such good company as you promise me, but the instruction of my future readers does not permit me to enjoy this satisfaction. I shall not send my book to press until your own shall have appeared, for I, too, intend to make your autopsy; dissect me therefore now; I promise you on my side that I will perform my duty conscientiously, properly and delicately. "Woman," you say, "being weaker than man with respect to _muscular force_, is not less inferior to him with respect to INDUSTRIAL, ARTISTIC, PHILOSOPHICAL AND MORAL POWER; so that if the condition of woman in society be regulated, as you demand for her, _by the same justice as the condition of man_, it is all over with her; she is a slave." Terrible man, you will be then always inconsistent, you will always contradict yourself and facts! What do you hold as the basis of right? _The simple quality of being human_; everything that distinguishes individuals disappears before right. Well! even though it were true that women were inferior to men, would it follow that their rights were not the same? According to you, by no means, if they form a part of the human species. There are not two kinds of justice, there is but one; there are not two kinds of right, there is but one in the absolute sense. The recognition and respect of individual autonomy in the lowest of human beings as well as in the man and woman of genius is the law which should preside over social relations; must a woman tell you this! Let us now examine the value of your series of _man and woman_. With respect to the reproduction of the species, they form a series; this is beyond dispute. As to the rest, do they form a series? No. _If it were a law_ that woman is _muscularly_ weaker than man, the strongest woman would be weaker than the weakest man; facts demonstrate the contrary daily. _If it were a law_ that women are inferior to men in _industrial power_, the most skillful woman would be inferior in industrial pursuits to the least skillful man; now facts demonstrate daily that there are women who are excellent manufacturers and excellent managers; men who are unskilled in and unsuited to this kind of pursuits. _If it were a law_ that women are inferior to men in _artistic power_, the best female artist would be inferior to the most indifferent male artist; now facts daily demonstrate the contrary; there are more great female than male tragedians; many men are mediocre in music and painting, and many women, on the other hand, remarkable in both respects, etc., etc.