e the atomic weight of oxygen or
the laws of motion, that woman is Nature's supreme instrument of the
future? If the answer to these questions be affirmative, the evidence of
the poets, of our own preferences, of religions ancient and modern, is
of merely secondary concern as corroborative, and as serving curiosity
to observe how far the teachings of passionless science have been
divined or denied by past ages and by other modes of perception and
inquiry. Therefore this is to be in its basis none other than a
biological treatise; for the laws of reproduction, the newly gained
knowledge regarding the nature of sex, and the facts of physiology,
afford the evidence of the essentially biological truth which has been
so often expressed by the present writer in the quasi-poetic terms
already set forth. Let us, then, first remind ourselves how the
individual, whether male or female, is to be looked upon in the light of
the work of Weismann in especial, and how this great truth, discovered
by modern biology and especially by the students of heredity, affects
our understanding of the difference between man and woman. Setting forth
these earlier pages in the year of the Darwin centenary, and the jubilee
of the "Origin of Species," a writer would have some courage who
proposed to discuss man and woman as if they were unique, rather than
the highest and latest examples of male and female: their nature to be
rightly understood only by due study of their ancestral forms, ancient
and modern. The biological problem of sex is our concern, and we may
have to traverse many past ages of "aeonian evolution," and even to
consider certain quite humble organisms, before we rightly see woman as
an evolutionary product of the laws of life.

But, first, as to the individual, of whatever sex. Observing the
familiar facts of our own lives and of the higher forms of life, both
animal and vegetable, with which we are acquainted, we must naturally at
first incline to regard as worse than paradoxical the modern biological
concept of the individual as existing for the race, of the body as
merely a transient host or trustee of the immortal germ-plasm. Since
life has its worth and value only in individuals, and since, therefore,
the race exists for the production of individuals, in any sense that we
human beings, at any rate, can accept, we must be reasonable in
expressing the apparently contrary but not less true view that the
individual exists for the r