ion of devices for killing and capture; and this aptitude
for invention was later extended to the invention of tools and of
mechanical devices in general, and finally developed into a settled
habit of scientific interest. The scientific imagination which
characterizes man in contrast with women is not a distinctive male
trait, but represents a constructive habit of attention associated
with freer movement and the pursuit of evasive animal forms. The
problem of control was more difficult, and the means of securing it
became more indirect, mediated, reflective, and inventive; that is,
more intelligent.

Woman's activities, on the other hand, were largely limited to plant
life, to her children, and to manufacture, and the stimulation to
mental life and invention in connection with these was not so powerful
as in the case of man. Her inventions were largely processes of
manufacture connected with her handling of the by-products of the
chase. So simple a matter, therefore, as relatively unrestricted
motion on the part of man and relatively restricted motion on the part
of woman determined the occupations of each, and these occupations
in turn created the characteristic mental life of each. In man this
was constructive, answering to his varied experience and the need of
controlling a moving environment; and in woman it was conservative,
answering to her more stationary and monotonous condition.

In early times man's superior physical force, the wider range of his
experience, his mechanical inventions in connection with hunting and
fighting, and his combination under leadership with his comrades to
carry out their common enterprises, resulted in a contempt for the
weakness of women and an almost complete separation in interest
between himself and the women of the group. The men frequently formed
clubs, and lived apart from the women; and even where this did not
happen, the men and women had no mental life in common. To this
contempt for women also was added a superstitious fear of them,
growing out of the primitive belief that weakness or any other bad
quality is infectious, and may be transferred by physical contact or
association.[270]

From Mr. Crawley's excellent paper on "Sexual Taboo" I transcribe the
following illustrations of this attitude:

In New Caledonia you rarely see men and women talking or
sitting together. The women seem perfectly content with the
company of their own sex. The men who loiter a