The Sexes in Science and History: An inquiry into the dogma of woman's inferiority to man — John Shaqi
The Sexes in Science and History: An inquiry into the dogma of woman's inferiority to manGamble, Eliza Burt
Philosophy
The Sexes in Science and History: An inquiry into the dogma of woman's inferiority to man
Gamble, Eliza Burt
Sex; Women -- History; Women -- Social conditions
Although the conditions of the past have required a vast expenditure
of physical energy, the activities of the future will make no such
demand. Nature’s forces directed by the human will and intellect are
already lessening the necessity for an excessive outlay of bodily
strength. It may be truly said that electricity and the innumerable
mechanical devices now in use have well nigh supplanted the necessity
for great physical exertion. Even war, should it be continued, which
is not likely, will be conducted without it. Destructive weapons based
upon high-power explosives require little physical effort for their
manipulation. The pugilist represents the departing glory of male
physical strength.
We are informed by Mr. Darwin that by a vast number of measurements
taken of various parts of the human body in different races, during
his Novara Expedition, it was found that the men in almost every case
presented a greater range of variations than women, and, as Mr. Wood
has carefully attended to the variations of the muscles of man, Mr.
Darwin quotes from him that “the greatest number of abnormalities
in each subject is found in males.” He adduces also the testimony of
several others who have practically investigated this subject, all of
whom agree in their statements that variations in the muscles are more
frequent in males than in females. These variations usually consist in
a reversion to lower types—a reversion in which muscles proper to lower
forms of life make their appearance.
In an examination of forty male subjects, there was in nineteen of them
a rudimentary muscle found which is designated as the ischio-pubic, and
in three others of the forty was observed a ligament which represents
this muscle; but, in an examination by the same person of thirty female
subjects, in only two of them was this muscle developed on both sides,
whilst in three others the rudimentary ligament was present. Thus while
we observe that about fifty-five per cent. of the males examined were
possessed of muscles proper to lower orders, in only about seventeen
per cent. of the females under observation did this reversion appear.
In a single male subject, seven muscular variations proper to apes were
indicated.
Numberless cases might be cited in which reversions and abnormalities
have been developed only in the male line. Of the porcupine men of the
Lambert family who lived in London last century, Haeckel says:
Edward Lambert, born in 1717, was remarkable for a most unusual and
monstrous formation of the skin. His whole body was covered with
a horny substance, about an inch thick, which rose in the form of
numerous thorn-shaped and scale-like processes, more than an inch
long. This monstrous formation on the outer skin, or epidermis, was
transmitted by Lambert to his sons and grandsons, but not to his
granddaughters.[34]
[34] _History of Creation_, 1884, vol. i., p. 178.
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