In order to prove that the _thetic_ woman, or woman considered apart from the influence of man, is such as you depict her, it is necessary that you should bring us face to face with an assemblage of such women, and afterwards, with another assemblage composed of men who have never been subjected to the influence of women, that we may verify for ourselves the native activity of the latter and the native inertness of the former. Have you had at your disposal, can you place at ours these proofs _de facto_? No; and if you neither have them nor can procure them, what is your thesis, if not the illusion of a brain sick with pride and with hatred of woman? 1. You say: man alone produces physical germs. Anatomy answers: _It is woman that produces the germ_; the organ that performs this function in her, as in all other females, is the ovary. 2. You say: woman is a diminutive of the man; she is an imperfect male; anatomy says: _man and woman are two distinct beings, each one complete_, each one furnished with a special organism, the one as necessary as the other. 3. You say with Paracelsus, of whom this is not the only absurdity: _where virility is wanting, the subject is imperfect; where it is taken away, the subject deteriorates_. Mere good sense replies: the being can only be incomplete or deteriorate _when it differs from its type_; now the type of woman is feminity not _masculinity_.... If, like you, I were a lover of paradox, I would say: _man is an imperfect woman_, since it is the woman that produces the germ; his part in reproduction is very doubtful, and science may even learn some day to dispense with it. This is Auguste Comte's paradox; it is worth as much as yours. To prove that woman is only an imperfect male, it is necessary to establish by facts that man on being deprived of virility, finds the organs developed in him peculiar to woman, becomes qualified for conception, gestation, delivery, and giving suck. Now I have never learned that any keeper of a seraglio had been transformed into an odahlic; have you? 4. You say: the organs peculiar to woman are inert, and purposeless with respect to herself; physiology answers: the labor that these organs accomplish is immense; pregnancy and the crisis that terminates it are incontestable proofs of this. The influence of these organs makes itself felt, not only on the general health, but in the intellectual and moral order. Pathology, no less eloquent, depicts to us the grave disorders produced among women by forced continence, incontinence, the excessive or perverted vitality of these organs which you pretend are inert.