It would thus appear that the present fashions for female apparel have a deeper significance than we have been in the habit of ascribing to them. We are still living under conditions peculiar to a sensual age, and have not yet outgrown the requirements which condemn women to a style of dress which hinders the free movements of the body and which checks all the activities of life. In one way the woman of the present time may be said to resemble the male Argus pheasant, whose decorations, although they serve to please his mate, greatly hinder his power of motion and the free use of his body and limbs. When we consider that apparel is but one, and a minor one, of the strictures under which women have laboured during the later era of human existence and when we consider all the ignoble and degrading uses to which womanhood has been subjected, the wonder is not that women have failed in the past to distinguish themselves in the various fields of intellectual labour in which men have achieved a limited degree of success, but that they have had sufficient energy and courage left to enable them even to attempt anything so far outside the boundary of their prescribed “sphere,” or that they have been able to transmit to their male offspring those powers through which they have gained their present stage of progress. With regard to Mr. Darwin’s comparison of the intellectual powers of the two sexes, and his assertion that man attains to a higher eminence in whatever he takes up than woman—that, for instance, he surpasses her in the production of poetry, music, philosophy, etc., the facts at hand suggest that if within mankind no higher motives and tastes had been developed than those derived from selfishness and passion, there would never have arisen a desire for poetry, music, philosophy, or science, or, in fact, for any of the achievements which have been the result of the more exalted activities of the human intellect. However, because of the subjection of the higher faculties developed in mankind, the poetry, music, and painting of the past betray their sensuous origin and plainly reveal the stage of advancement which has been reached, while history, philosophy, and even science, judging from Mr. Darwin’s methods, have not yet wholly emerged from the murky atmosphere of a sensuous age.