reformers who allow themselves to speak slightingly of “the merely animal function of child-bearing.”  Higher than either—­wiser than both put together—­is that noble statement with which Jean Paul begins his fine essay on the education of girls in “Levana.”  “Before being a wife or mother, one is a human being; and neither motherly nor wifely destination can overbalance or replace the human, but must become its means, not end.  As above the poet, the painter, or the hero, so above the mother, does the human being rise preeminent.”

Here is sure anchorage.  We can hold to this.  And, fortunately, all the analogies of nature sustain this position.  Throughout nature the laws of sex rule everywhere; but they rule a kingdom of their own, always subordinate to the greater kingdom of the vital functions.  Every creature, male or female, finds in its sexual relations only a subordinate part of its existence.  The need of food, the need of exercise, the joy of living, these come first, and absorb the bulk of its life, whether the individual be male or female.  This Antiope butterfly, that flits at this moment past my window,—­the first of the season,—­spends almost all its existence in a form where the distinction of sex lies dormant:  a few days, I might almost say a few hours, comprise its whole sexual consciousness, and the majority of its race die before reaching that epoch.  The law of sex is written absolutely through the whole insect world.  Yet everywhere it is written as a secondary and subordinate law.  The life which is common to the sexes is the principal life; the life which each sex leads, “as such,” is a minor and subordinate thing.

The same rule pervades nature.  Two riders pass down the street before my window.  One rides a horse, the other a mare.  The animals were perhaps foaled in the same stable, of the same progenitors.  They have been reared alike, fed alike, trained alike, ridden alike; they need the same exercise, the same grooming; nine tenths of their existence are the same, and only the other tenth is different.  Their whole organization is marked by the distinction of sex; but, though the marking is ineffaceable, the distinction is not the first or most important fact.

If this be true of the lower animals, it is far more true of the higher.  The mental and moral laws of the universe touch us first and chiefly as human beings.  We eat our breakfasts as human beings, not as men or women; and it is the same with nine tenths of our interests and duties in life.  In legislating or philosophizing for woman, we must neither forget that she has an organization distinct from that of man, nor must we exaggerate the fact.  Not “first the womanly and then the human,” but first the human and then the womanly, is to be the order of her training.

DARWIN, HUXLEY, and BUCKLE