uture conditions, and who will excel in the most numerous forms
of activity, will be, not merely the muscularly powerful and bulky, but
the highly versatile, active, vital, adaptive, sensitive, physically
fine-drawn type; and, as that type, though, like the muscularly heavy
and powerful, by no means peculiar to and confined to one sex, is yet
rather more commonly found in conjunction with a female organism, it is
quite possible that, taken in the bulk and on the whole, the female half
of humanity may, by virtue of its structural adaptions, be found most
fitted for the bulk of human labours in the future!

As with individuals and races, so also with sexes, changed social
conditions may render exactly those subtile qualities, which in one
social state were a disadvantage, of the highest social advantage in
another.

The skilled diplomatist or politician, so powerful in his own element,
on board ship during a storm becomes at once of less general value or
consideration than the meanest sailor who can reef a sail or guide a
wheel; and, were we to be reduced again suddenly to a state of nature,
a company of highly civilised men and women would at once, as we have
before remarked, find their social value completely inverted; landed on
a desert shore, unarmed and naked, to encounter wild beasts and savages,
and to combat nature for food, the primitive scale of human values would
at once reassert itself. It would not then be the mighty financier, the
learned judge, or great poet and scholar who would be sought after, but
the thickest-headed navvy who could throw a stone so exactly that he
brought down a bird, and who could in a day raise a wall which would
shelter the group; and the man so powerful that he could surely strike
an enemy or wild beast dead with his club, would at once be objects of
social regard and attain individual eminence, and perhaps dominance. It
would not be the skilled dancer, who in one night in a civilised state
earns her hundreds, nor yet the fragile clinging beauty, but the girl
of the broad back and the strong limb, who could collect wood and carry
water, who would be the much considered and much sought after female in
such a community. Even in the animal world, there is the same inversion
in values, according as the external conditions vary. The lion, while
ruling over every other creature in his primitive wilds, by right of his
untamable ferocity, size, and rapacity, is yet bound to become a prey
t