then it is slightly better in men.  If it means ability to co-ordinate movements rapidly to unforeseen stimuli it is clearly better in women.[44]

We have no other than a utilitarian basis for judging some variations advantageous and others disadvantageous.  We can estimate them only with reference to activity and the service or disservice to the individual and society implied in them, and a given variation must receive very different valuations at different historical periods in the development of the race.  Departures from the normal are simply nature’s way of “trying conclusions.”  The variations which have proved of life-saving advantage have in the course of time become typical, while the individuals in which unfavorable variations, or defects, have occurred have not survived in the struggle for existence.  Morphologically men are the more unstable element of society, and this instability expresses itself in the two extremes of genius and idiocy.  Genius in general is correlated with an excessive development in brain-growth, stopping dangerously near the line of hypertrophy and insanity; while microcephaly is a variation in the opposite direction, in which idiocy results from arrested development of the brain, usually through premature closing of the sutures; and both these variations occur more frequently in men than in women.  There is also evidence that defects in general are more frequent in men than in women.

A committee reported to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1894,[45] that of some 50,000 children (26,287 boys, and 23,713 girls) seen personally by Dr. Francis Warner (1892-94) 8,941 were found defective in some respect.  Of these, 19 per cent. (5,112) were boys, and 16 per cent. (3,829) were girls.

An examination of 1,345 idiots and imbeciles in Scotland by Mitchell showed the following distribution of the sexes: 

Male    Female    Male        Female
Idiots                430      284     or 100       to 66.0
Imbeciles             321      310     or 100       to 96.5

showing that “the excess of males is much greater among idiots than among imbeciles; in other words, that the excess of males is most marked in the graver forms of the disease."[46]

A census of the insane in Prussia in 1880 showed that 9,809 males and 7,827 females were born idiots.  Koch’s statistics of insanity show that in idiots there is almost always a majority of males, in the insane, a majority of females.  But the majority of male idiots is so much greater than the majority of female insane that when idiots and insane are classed together there remains a majority of males.[47] Insanity is, however, more frequently induced by external conditions, and less dependent on imperfect or arrested cerebral development.  Mayr has shown from statistics of Bavaria that insanity is infrequent before the sixteenth year; and even before the twentieth year the number of insane is not considerable.[48] In insanity the chances of recovery of the female are greater than those of the male, and mortality is higher among insane men than among insane women.  There is practical agreement among pathologists on this point.[49] Campbell points out in detail[50] that the male sex is more liable than the female to gross lesions of the nervous system—­a fact which he attributes to the greater variability of the male.