plete, that (except during her eonfinements-if she should foolishly expose herself to such an impediment to her usefulness) she would be in every respect identical with man. Others hold that she would be distinguished from him by retain ing all her own superiority, while she absorbed all his special attributes. She would be more chaste, more refined, more virtuous, more religious; not less bold, persevering, thoughtful, and comprehensive. These are engaging speculations, and we will not be rash enough to discuss what the future may have in store: "Heaven from all creatures hides the book of Fate, All but the page prescribed their present state." another woman's dress, and noted all the evidences of character in her face, before a man who has been equally occupied in examining her knows the details of her features. If we were called upon to indicate the most marked and deep-seated distinction between the minds of men and women, we should say that the minds of men rested in generals and were stored with partieulars, and that the minds of women rested in particulars and were prolific in general ideas. Men, it is said, are occupied with facts, and so they are; but it is the characteristic of the highest and most typically masculine intellects always to be which binds them together, and to base pressing through facts on to the principle their lives and practice on the results thus attained. Women, it is said, are always rushing into general ideas; so they are; but it is as a way to particular facts, and they move from and are guided by the special relations thus educed. The mind of a woman is more fluid, as it were, than that of a man; it moves more easily, and its operations have a less cohesive and permanent character. A woman thinks transiently, and in a handto-mouth sort of way. She makes a new observation and a new deduction for each case, and constantly also a new general idea. A man, less quick and less fertile, and combines them by principles; a woaccumulates facts, collects them in classes, man's mind is a running stream, ever emptying itself and ever freshly supplied. She takes a bucketful when she wants it. A man's mind is a reservoir arranged to work a water-wheel. Women are scarcely less steady and persevering than men in the pursuit of practical ends: they are more full of resources and expedients; they have a greater appreciation of, and a far greater power of wielding, small and indirect influences-they have tact; but they do not discuss practical matters efficiently when met together; they become discursive, set larks and run hares; each is occupied with her own idea, and several speak together. They do the work excellently: they do not shine in the commit The most obvious characteristics of the feminine intellect are delicacy of perceptive power and rapidity of movement. A woman sees sees a thousand things which escape a man. Physically even she is quicker sighted. A girl is a better bird-tee-room. nester than a boy: a woman marks a thing which passes over a man's eye too rapidly for him to perceive it. Mentally she takes in many more impressions in the same time than a man does. A woman will have mastered the minutest details in Connected with these distinctions is the fact that the knowledge of women is for the most part direct, unreferred, and unclassified; they differ from men in having far more varied, subtle, and numerous inlets to knowledge; and they rely upon these, and do not care to remember and arrange previous experience, as a man does. A lady will look a servant, who comes to be hired, in the face, and say he is not honest. She can not tell you why she thinks so. She says she does not like his expression, she feels he is not honest -no consideration would induce her to take him into her service. He has the best of characters, and you engage him: he robs you-you may be quite sure he will do that. Years after another man comes the same lady looks him in the face, and says he too is not honest; she says so again fresh from her mere insight, but you also say he is not honest. You say, I remember I had a servant with just the same look about him three years ago, and he robbed me. This is one great distinction of the female intellect; it walks directly and unconsciously, by more delicate insight and a more refined and more trusted intuition, to an end to which men's minds grope carefully and ploddingly along. Women have exercised a most beneficial influence in softening the hard and untruthful outline which knowledge is apt to assume in the hands of direct scientific observers and experimenters: they have prevented the casting aside of a mass of most valuable truth, which is too fine to be caught in the material sieve, and eludes the closest questioning of the microscope and the testglass; which is allied with our passions, our feelings, and especially holds the fine boundary-line where mind and matter, sense and spirit, wave their floating and indistinguishable boundaries, and exercise their complex action and reaction. Women, acting faithfully on their intuitions in such things, and justified by the event, teach men also to rely upon them in their lives, to give them place in their philosophy; and incalculably widening, ennobling, and refining is the influence they have thus had upon what the world calls its knowledge. But their influence, like their knowledge, has been direct, immediate, applied to particular cases; and it has never, therefore, been very generally recognized, or moved in us the gratitude that is due from us. The characteristics of the moral and spiritual nature of women are closely allied with those of their intellect. Their superiority in all that depends on intuition; their higher apprehension of and fuller life in personal relations, as distin guished both from material things and abstract ideas; their deeper power of influencing and greater dependence on individuals, as contrasted with a wider power exercised over numbers-are too obvious not to have been often made the subject of remark. It is an idle question which is the higher in creation when each is in an equal degree supplemental to the other; but if the point must be mooted, perhaps the following consideration may indicate the true solution: WOMAN NEARER TO ANGELS. If we glance through the various divisions of the animal kingdom, we shall find that the most perfect forms of each division are not those through which it passes into the class next above it. It is not the horse or the fox-hound which treads on the heels of man, but the baboon; it is not the rose or the oak which stands on the verge of vegetable and animal life, but the fern or the sea-weed. Something is lost of the typical completeness of each class as it approaches the verge of that above it. The same is true of man; it is not necessarily the most healthy and highly developed specimen which is nearest a higher order of beings; and in the distinction of sexes, if man be the more perfect creature, woman is nearer to the angels. Woman is higher than man in her nature; she is less noble in the degree of self-control and independent responsibility imposed upon her. To men, with instincts less pure, intuitions less deep, sensibilities less fine, and a heart less faithful and unselfish, has been given a weightier charge-to be more entirely under his own control, to be more completely master of himself. Often has human existence been compared to the wide ocean, over which each winged ship of individual life struggles forward through storm and sunshine. Man sets the sail and leans over the wheel, bends his eye on the compass and the chart, questions the heavens of his place, and considers with anxious revolving mind what port it were best to seek and what course to make; asks even whether there be an ultimate haven and a pathway across the deep; and, bent on knowing rather than trusting, questions the silent unresponsive stars, and casts his lead in the fathomless ocean. But woman bears a loadstone in her breast, and, standing on the prow, | Their sins are for the most part sins gazes forward over the waves, and is against higher impulses, the simple perdrawn heavenward by some strong at- mission of a lower impulse to outweigh a traction. Devious gusts of passion blow higher one where the collision is so simher astray; and losing once her track, ple that the judgment has no place. A sudden and utter shipwreck on sunken man feel more deeply a sin against his derocks or sand too often awaits her; but liberate convictions; he throws the sins originally she has but to be true to her of impulse aside more lightly, especially highest instincts, and needs not nor cares if the temptation has been strong and to distract her mind with questionings of sudden; but they weigh heavier on a the event. Her nature is higher than woman, and they degrade her the more man's; but man is set higher above his because her character does depend more nature. To speak thus is of course to ex- on the unbroken strength of her higher press, in unmodified language, the ex- impulses. treme tendencies of either sex. We do Again, compassion to the individual is not mean that men have no instincts, or the woman's virtue, justice to all the women no consciences, only that each is man's. But there is no need to point stronger and fuller in one direction than out the familiar operation of the more inthe other. And the differences between stinctive nature of women finding its life male and female consciences illustrate the among personal relations; suffice it that same thing. The sense of duty, the in- out of these spring her gracious prerogastinct of right, has in itself no discriminat- tive and happiest attribute-the power ing power; it simply asserts in its very to live in others, through the affections action, whenever called into exercise, a to enjoy self-sacrifice, and, high above higher claim to the obedience of the will these, the faculty through love to discern than any other of our moving impulses. and rest upon a personal God, We do But it does not itself decide on a course not say that the influence of women has of action, any more than hunger tells us kept personal religion alive in the world; what to eat. Conscience is the reason yet the truth lies not far from this; and brought to bear on the sense of duty, certainly there are thousands of men who rather say it is the verdict of the reason owe it to her alone that they have ever (using the word in its large sense) en- soared above a cold and stoical conscienforced by the sense of duty. In men tiousness. This is a higher office than destitute of judgment and force of cha- preaching, or legislating, or "inculcating racter we sometimes see strange vagaries ideas," or rivaling men in any of the of the instinct of duty; and in women, more general but less profound influences in whom the reason is less comprehensive they exercise over their fellows. In reand less distinctly supreme over the im- ligious life, as elsewhere, the highest of pulses, the conscience is not less binding, all is not that which is specially masculine but it is certainly less consistent than in or feminine, but which unites the best of men. It yields to personal considera- both, which is based on the most contions, it falls under the sway of the affec-scious and deliberate self-surrender of the tions. You may see one woman morbid ly conscientious in the discharge of some remote duty; and not only neglecting, as a man often does, others more near and more important, but incapable of being convinced that they are duties. may see another in her ordinary intercourse with those around her utterly disregard all the claims of sincerity; yet there shall be some one whom she loves to whom she is as clear as day, and in intercourse with whom she would not only not conceal, but think it wicked to conceal or distort the least circumstance. Where women do feel a duty, however, they are generally more exact and scrupulous in the performance of it than men. You will to the highest claims—which_vivifies conscience by love, and loves God because he is good. WOMEN HAVE TAUGHT MEN. There is a vast deal which women have taught men, and men have then taught the world; and which the men alone have had the credit for, because the woman's share is untraceable. But, cry some of our modern ladies, this is exactly what we wish to avoid; we can teach the world directly, and we insist on being allowed to do so. If our sphere has been hitherto more personal, it is because you have forced seclusion and restriction upon us. Educate us like yourselves, and we shall be competent to fill the same place as you do, and discharge the same duties. With extreme deference, we do not think this is quite so; we can not believe, what is nowadays so broadly asserted, that the difference between the male and female intellect is due entirely to difference of education and circumstance, and that women, placed under the same conditions as men, would become men except in the bare physical distinctions of sex. If the education and lives of women have been so utterly obliterative of such important qualities, it seems strange they should have retained what they have got. No influences have succeeded in making them stupid, in destroying the spring and vivacity of their minds, their readiness, their facility, their abundant resource. Yet their education has been little, if at all, directed to foster these qualities more than those of reflection and comprehensive thought. Reverse the question. Do not men in innumerable instances develop the characteristic masculine intellect in all its force, totally irrespective of any training whatever and is it supposed that any care, however sedulous, would make the mass of men rivals of the mass of women in those qualities which we have indicated as specially belonging to the latter? But it is fighting with shadows to combat such an assertion. The evidence of facts against it is scattered, minute, appealing in varied form to individual minds and experiences; but it is overwhelming to all but the most prejudiced minds. On the other hand, none will deny that much is due to education; nor can any limits be assigned à priori to the intellectual achievements of which a judicious training might make the female mind capable. We only say that men with equal advantages will go further in their own direction. The same pains bestowed on an average boy and girl, will not make the girl so patient and accurate an investigator as the boy; but neither will it give the boy so quick and suggestive a mind as that of the girl. There can be no doubt, however, that our modern system of female education does great injustice and injury to the subjects of it; part of education at least ought to be directed to preserving the balance of faculties. In saying this, we do not urge, as some have done, that its office is to create and maintain an equilibrium of powers, and that those which are naturally the most strong should be allowed to rest in the vain endeavor to place the weaker ones on a level with them; that because a boy has a taste for languages you should confine him to mathematics, or because he is a soldier by nature try to make him a clergyman by profession; the true rule probably is, to give by education the strongest propulsion in the direction in which a man naturally leans, provided it be a desirable one, and at the same time sedulously to guard against absolute deficiency in any other direction; to preserve an impetus, and to guard against an over-balance. We shall make nothing of attempting to make men of women; but there remains much to be done in opposition to a system which hems them so closely within certain limits of range, and urges them so exclusively along the distinctively feminine path. All honor to those who, without losing sight of insurmountable and ineffaceable distinctions, bend their practical efforts to giving a broader and completer character to the education of girls, and insist that they shall not be debarred from studies, and, above all, from modes of study, which strengthen and invigorate the reflective powers. Those modern Amazons who insist upon setting up their sex as a separate class of beings, naturally at enmity with man, and by him unjustly subjugated and ignorantly tyrannized over, are fond of speaking of us as if we either followed a Machiavellian policy in keeping our wives and daughters ignorant, or as if as a matter of taste we preferred to associate with ignorant females that we may rejoice in our superiority. This is a mistake. No doubt Lieutenant Smith, skilled only in horses, does dislike a young lady to mention Dante; and Jones, who has contracted all he once knew into a familiarity with the prices and quality of cotton, trembles to be asked what Kepler's laws are; but it is an error to suppose that educated men prefer the society of uninformed women. Perhaps, indeed, there is no intellectual exercise so delightful, or so highly appreciated on either side, as the interchange of ideas between cultivated minds of the different sexes. From a female mind on a level with his own a man gathers much more that is new and interesting to him than from conversation with a fellow-man; he sees a new side of old ideas, and is presented with a thousand delicate sug gestions beyond the reach of his own faculties; nay, often when his mind is saturated with knowledge which yet forms a turbid incoherent mass, the touch of a woman's mind, some hint-vague perhaps, but far-reaching-will make it shoot into sudden crystalline harmony. It is idle to say that men, whenever they are worthy of it, do not appreciate this sort of intercourse, that they do not consider it one of the highest pleasures of their lives. But they hate, and most justly hate, women who parade their knowledge and and their cleverness for the gratification of their own vanity, who are so narrowminded that they can talk nothing but information, and so indifferent to the sufferings of other as to obtrude it on them without regard to the occasion. Bores are selfish, callous, pachydermatous animals; and these qualities are peculiarly disagreeable in women. This is a class all agree to avoid; but that intellectual culture of the very highest order to which they can attain is not as good and as desirable for women as it is for men, none but those who are either narrow-minded, or themselves ignorant, will care to deny. Of course the pursuit of intellectual excellence must not in women interfere with higher and nearer duties; but neither must it do so in men; and the only real difference which exists is, that the natural pursuits of men make a severe training of the intellect and a complete stocking of the mind more universally and necessarily a duty with them than with women. Do any women complain of this? Much more justly might men regret that the arrangements of society and the necessities of life leave them so much less opportunity than women for the cultivation of the heart. The greatest deficiency in female education is, and ever has been, the absence of means for forming trained habits of thought; and it is impossible to say how much of the rash and desultory reasoning of women, and their want of amenableness to logical proof, is the result of their defective education. An opinion of female tact, insight into character, and instincts of management formed in the harems of the the East, would not differ widely from one formed in the drawingrooms of London; but the estimates of intellectual capacity made in the two places would vary as if made of two dif ferent kinds of creatures. The highest development of the human mind lies on : the verge between the sexes; and though the main distinctions are permanent, it can scarcely be doubted that in the progress of civilization they will be ever growing less marked and prominent only we are apt to make the great mistake that all the improvement is to be in one direction, that the minds of women are always to be elevated and strengthened by making them more like those of men; whereas the fact is, that a great deal remains to be done for the intellects of men by making them more like those of women. What is most needed in female education is not so much a change in the subjects towards which it is directed, at least in its better forms, as a change in its whole method. Men are taught books too much, and things too little; but women infinitely more so. The notion is still common that the most important part of knowledge consists in knowing what other men have said about things; to be familiar not with what is, but with what is printed. But girls are never taken past this step. The idea is never suggested to them that there are subjects of inquiry in the world, things about which the truth is to be found out, actual existences of which correct ideas are to be formed by the imagination and memory and reasoning powers. They are encouraged in the idea that history is what Mr. Hume has said, instead of being led to look back into the actual past, and to gather from every possible source an insight into its forms and conditions: they think geogra phy lies in Butler's Atlas, and consists in being able to name rivers, or put your finger on a town in the map, instead of scanning the real physical contour and character of a country: they are left unacquainted with the most attractive aspects of science, or taught only a few particulars by rote: they can name the parts of a flower, and talk of calynx and corolla; but they are taught to study botany in their gardens, and to examine for themselves how plants live and grow? In astronomy a few perhaps can tell you the distance of the sun, or explain how the moon is eclipsed; but where will you find one, without some special advantages, who has looked on the heavens themselves, is familiar with the apparent motions of the sun and stars, and has some idea of the sort of reasoning by which the mighty results of the science have been obtained? If women (and men too) were taught to |