When any woman, old or young, asks the question, Which among all modern books ought I to read first? the answer is plain.  She should read Buckle’s lecture before the Royal Institution upon “The Influence of Woman on the Progress of Knowledge.”  It is one of two papers contained in a thin volume called “Essays by Henry Thomas Buckle.”  As a means whereby a woman may become convinced that her sex has a place in the intellectual universe, this little essay is almost indispensable.  Nothing else quite takes its place.

Darwin and Huxley seem to make woman simply a lesser man, weaker in body and mind,—­an affectionate and docile animal, of inferior grade.  That there is any aim in the distinction of the sexes, beyond the perpetuation of the race, is nowhere recognized by them, so far as I know.  That there is anything in the intellectual sphere to correspond to the physical difference; that here also the sexes are equal yet diverse, and each the natural completion and complement of the other,—­this neither Huxley nor Darwin explicitly recognizes.  And with the utmost admiration for their great teachings in other ways, I must think that here they are open to the suspicion of narrowness.

Huxley wrote in “The Reader,” in 1864, a short paper called “Emancipation—­ Black and White,” in which, while taking generous ground in behalf of the legal and political position of woman, he yet does it pityingly, de haut en bas, as for a creature hopelessly inferior, and so heavily weighted already by her sex that she should be spared all further trials.  Speaking through an imaginary critic, who seems to represent himself, he denies “even the natural equality of the sexes,” and declares “that in every excellent character, whether mental or physical, the average woman is inferior to the average man, in the sense of having that character less in quantity and lower in quality.”  Finally he goes so far as “to defend the startling paradox that even in physical beauty man is the superior.”  He admits that for a brief period of early youth the case may be doubtful, but claims that after thirty the superior beauty of man is unquestionable.  Thus reasons Huxley; the whole essay being included in his volume of “Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews.” [1]

Darwin’s best statements on the subject may be found in his “Descent of Man."[2] He is, as usual, more moderate and guarded than Huxley.  He says, for instance:  “It is generally admitted that with women the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.”  Then he passes to the usual assertion that man has thus far attained to a higher eminence than woman.  “If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music,—­ comprising composition and performance,—­history, science,