ut 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