“The sexually mature body of a woman has always during the intermenstrual period to make good the loss undergone during menstruation. Hardly has this been effected and the climax of vital energy been once more attained, when a new follicle ruptures in the ovary, and the menstrual hæmorrhage recurs; thus continually, month after month, the vital undulation and the vital energy rises and falls. =The energy periodically expended in woman’s principal function has for thousands of years ceased to be available for her own internal development.= The actual loss on each occasion is so trifling that numerous women hardly find it disagreeable. The effect depends upon summation. The earnings are almost immediately spent, =not for the purpose of her own domestic economy, but for the sake of another, in the service of reproduction=; this comes first, for the species must be preserved. =To accumulate capital for her personal needs has been rendered more difficult for woman than it is for man.=” The previously quoted biological law of Spencer (regarding the antagonism between reproduction and the higher evolutionary tendency), of which menstruation affords so interesting an illustration, explains also the fact pointed out by Milne Edwards, Darwin, Brooks, Lombroso, Alfons Bilharz, and other investigators--to wit, the greater simplicity and primitiveness of woman as compared with the more complicated and more variable nature of man--more variable, because it oscillates within wider boundaries. Paracelsus long ago enunciated the profound saying, “=Woman is nearer to the world than man.=” It would be =fundamentally erroneous= to deduce from these considerations any inferiority or comparative inutility of woman. Rather, indeed, the nature of her bodily structure in relation to the purposes it has to fulfil is comparatively nearer perfection; and this admirable adaptation has undergone an increase in the course of the evolution of civilization. We have already noted the fact that under the influence of the continually increasing predominance of the brain in the male, certain retrogressive processes have also made themselves manifest (as, for example, the increasing loss of hair); and these processes in woman have gone farther than in man, because in her case the progressive development is =in its very nature= less extensive. Hence recent investigators, such as Havelock Ellis, have actually come to the conclusion that the ideal type, towards which the bodily development of mankind is striving, is represented by the feminine--that is, by a youthful type.[19]