and philosophy, with half a dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison.”  But the obvious answer, that nearly every name on his list, upon the masculine side, would probably be taken from periods when woman was excluded from any fair competition,—­this he does not seem to recognize at all.  Darwin, of all men, must admit that superior merit generally arrives later, not earlier, on the scene; and the question for him to answer is, not whether woman equalled man in the first stages of the intellectual “struggle for life,” but whether she is not gaining on him now.

If, in spite of man’s enormous advantage in the start, woman is already overtaking his very best performances in several of the highest intellectual departments,—­as, for instance, prose fiction and dramatic representation,—­then it is mere dogmatism in Mr. Darwin to deny that she may yet do the same in other departments.  We in this generation have actually seen this success achieved by Rachel and Ristori in the one art, by “George Sand” and “George Eliot” in the other.  Woman is, then, visibly gaining on man in the sphere of intellect; and, if so, Mr. Darwin, at least, must accept the inevitable inference.

But this is arguing the question on the superficial facts merely.  Buckle goes deeper, and looks to principles.  That superior quickness of women, which Darwin dismisses so lightly as something belonging to savage epochs, is to Buckle the sign of a quality which he holds essential, not only to literature and art, but to science itself.  Go among ignorant women, he says, and you will find them more quick and intelligent than equally ignorant men.  A woman will usually tell you the way in the street more readily than a man can; a woman can always understand a foreigner more easily; and Dr. Currie says in his letters, that when a laborer and his wife came to consult him, the man always got all the information from the wife.  Buckle illustrates this at some length, and points out that a woman’s mind is by its nature deductive and quick; a man’s mind, inductive and slow; that each has its value, and that science profoundly needs both.

“I will endeavor,” he says, “to establish two propositions.  First, that women naturally prefer the deductive method to the inductive.  Secondly, that women, by encouraging in men deductive habits of thought, have rendered an immense though unconscious service to the progress of science, by preventing scientific investigators from being as exclusively inductive as they would otherwise be.”

Then he shows that the most important scientific discoveries of modern times—­as of the law of gravitation by Newton, the law of the forms of crystals by Hauey, and the metamorphosis of plants by Goethe—­were all essentially the results of that a priori or deductive method “which, during the last two centuries, Englishmen have unwisely despised.”  They were all the work, in a manner, of the imagination,—­of