that, in fact, you discover here that the mere corporeal life of the larva possesses no sexual nature, and that a sexual nature may be superadded by a certain economy of the hive, an economy that can cause the ovum so to develop itself, as to become fitly provided with the fecundating apparatus and material, or to become a queen bee, or germiferous bee; for, when a queen dies, after having deposited many thousand eggs in the mule bee cell, the alarm and confusion in the hive are very extraordinary, but it subsides after the tumult of the first excitement, and the mules or workers select some one egg, for which they enlarge the cell by converting three common ones into a single royal cell; and then, by feeding the grub with an aliment called royal jelly, they cause it to pass into the female state, and thus the lost queen is succeeded by a queen produced from the egg of a mule or worker-bee; an egg that could only have developed a non-sexual creature but for the special influences brought to bear upon it from a state necessity. I ask you again, if this be true, whether it does not show that the sexual nature is not an original nature, ⚫ but a nature superimposed upon a mere animal or living nature. And, if true of the bee, does not that truth established, likewise establish the law for all possible animal and even vegetable existences?

I see not how a better proof, or, at least, illustration, could be given of my idea, that the sexual nature is a climax; it is a culminating life-force that evolves it.

It ought not to excite our astonishment that the female sexual nature gives to her physical, intellectual and moral attributes, a bias different from that of the male.

Her organs are different-they are subject to fluctuations as to the tide of life within them that those of the male are by no means exposed to. They require a different and more complex system of innervations, more expensive to the nerve centres than those of the male; more delicate, sensitive, impressible than his. These are circumstances implying a dependence and physical debility as compared with him; a reliance and trusting to his power; and, in fact, all the peculiarities that mark her as a creature of the feminine and gentle sex.

I shall, in my next letter, occupy your attention with some remarks on the distinctive characteristics of the female, to which I shall beg to invite your attention, not with a view that you may

learn of me what those distinctive characteristics are-for a volume would not suffice fully to relate them-but that I may, perhaps, be able to turn your attention in that direction, in the hope that your young and vigorous strength may be incited to a more consistent and energetic pursuit of whatever literature and science. ought to be garnered up by a physician, as the ornaments and aids of his career of usefulness and dignity. Farewell.

C. D. M.

LETTER IV.

SEXUAL PECULIARITIES.

GENTLEMEN:-Before I proceed to the consideration of those topics which are to engage our attention in the main, I wish to take advantage of this occasion to say some words to you on the Distinctive Characteristics of the Female-or rather, I should say, on some of them-for to describe them all, would require rather a series of letters than a single discourse. I shall, therefore, in the present letter, attempt to indicate only a few points of contrast betwixt the male and female, with a view to turn your attention that way. I could readily fill a volume upon the different texts that I am about to present to your consideration.

It is proper, I believe, that I should fulfill this design, for I have long thought, as I now do, that without some prefatory remarks in this direction, you might be less fully prepared to receive those views of the disorders to which the woman is subject, which it behooves you as medical men to acquire; and less capable to appreciate those modifications of therapeutical indication and process that are demanded by the moral, the intellectual, and the physical qualities of the female; for her mere human, or generic nature is modified by her sexual or female nature, to such a degree, that in certain of the great crises of her life, she demands a treatment adapted to the specialties of her own constitution, as a moral, a sexual, germiferous, gestative, and parturient creature.

I do not suppose you could acquire just views on these points in the dissecting-room, or the theatre of anatomy alone. Nor can

I give them to you here in one letter; the time is too short. There, it is true, you might explore the items of her physical structure, in order to compare them with those of the hardier sex. You might there learn that though she be a part of mankind, a truer Zygozoaire than those of M. de Blainville's classification, she yet differs from men in her stature, which is lower; in her weight, which is less; in her form, which is more gracile and beautiful; in her reproductive organs, that are peculiar to her; and in her intellectual and moral perceptivity and powers, which are feminine as her organs are.

Beyond all these, you shall have to explore the history of those wonderful functions and destinies which her sexual nature enables her to fulfil, and the strange and secret influences which her organs, by their nervous constitution, and her functions, by their relation to her whole life-force, whether in sickness or health, are capable of exerting, not on the body alone, but on the heart, the mind, and the very soul of woman.

The medical practitioner has, then, much to study, as to the female, that is not purely medical—but psychological and moral rather: such researches will be a future obligation lying heavily upon you, upon all of you.

Every well educated medical man ought to know something more of women than is contained in the volumes of a medical library. Her history and literature, in all ages and countries, ought to be gathered as the garlands with which to adorn his triumphant career as a physician; but these insignia of his power he can only gather by the careful and tasteful study of his subject among the rich stores of learning that are gained in the belleslettres collections, whether archaiological, mediæval, or modern.

The medical man, surely, of all men, ought to be best able to appreciate the influence of the sex in the social compact. But for the power of that influence, which one of you would doubt the rapid relapse of society into the violence and chaos of the earliest barbarism?

Are you not aware that the elegance and the polish of the Christian nations are due to the presence of the Sex in societynot in the Zenana! Do you not perceive that Music, Poetry, Painting, all the arts of elegance: Luxury, Fashion, (that potent spell!) are of her, and through her, and to her? Versailles and Marli, and the Trianons, had never been built for men. The

loom blends and sets forth the dyes that add richer reflections to her bloom; the wheel flies for polishing the diamond that is to flash in impotent rivality above her eyes; sea and land are ransacked of their treasures for her; and the very air yields its egrets, and marabouts, and paradise-birds, that they may add piquancy to her style, and grace to her gesture. Even literature and the sciences are in a good measure due to her patronage and approbation, which is the motive power to all manly endeavor. This is true, since, but for her approving smile, and her rewarding caress, what is there should stir man from the sole, the dire, unremitted compulsion to act that he may live? With woman for his companion, he acts not only that he may live, but that he may live like a Christian and like a Gentleman.

"Blest as the immortal Gods is he,

The youth who fondly sits by thee,
And hears and sees thee all the while,
Softly speak, and sweetly smile!"

The great stage of the world, we are informed by the inspired writers, was prepared as the scene of a grand moral drama. The earth and all that it inherit is for man, his use, his delight, his trial! But, this mankind-this genus man-what is it? It is an imperishable unit-it commenced at the beginning-it touches the middle and the end of time. It is a vast wave rolling down the tide of time, ever rolling, ever descending. Its spray and its foam are lost in the sands or melted in air, or the fragments of its mortality are broken off and swallowed up in the grave; but the unit is unbroken; the wave rolls onward, onward forever; perdurable; and shall not be swallowed up till the last trump shall sound, and the last end be come. The sun himself "grows dim with years," but the unit, the Genus man, springs ever fresh in immortal youth and vigor, like Antæus of old, foreshowing the immortality of that spiritual part to which Adrian the pagan addressed his speech, as it was leaving the imperial possessor a mere dust-fragment of the vast, ever-living unit man.

Animula vagula blandula
Hospes comesque corporis,

Quæ nunc, abibis in locis.

AEL. SPARTIANUS.-Adrian. Cæsar.

Now are not these great considerations? and yet from what meanness do they spring, even the germiferous tissue of the

female! It is from her stroma that issues the generic as well as the genetic force! What a wondrous law! what a wondrous power is that which maintains each genus and species pure and unalloyed as when it issued from the Creator's hand! So strange, so powerful, that each of them is set, as it were, within a magic ring, out of whose charmed round it can never stray; so that no wild and horrid passion, no brutal lust, no insane desire can break, much less change or abrogate the law that set forth the primordial models, "each after his kind," of the species of the globe. For notwithstanding the countless myriads of generations that from the remotest ages have reproduced individuals more numerous than the sands of the shore or the stars in the firmament, each blade of grass still obedient to its generic law, still imitates exactly its primitive pattern; and every elephant or worm; every eagle that soars to the sun, or sparrow that chirps in the hedge; every man, and every woman go steadily, like the current of a river, down Time's flowing stream, ever ending, ever beginning, always changing, yet immutably the same!

I repeat it, the generic power is launched from the ovarian stroma: that is the sole animal concrete that is capable of producing yelk matter. Yelk matter is germinal or generic matter; I should rather say reproductive matter. The male tissues are nowhere endowed with the power of this yelk production, and the sole elaboration of the stroma of ovaries is germ-elaboration. See, then, in this unobvious, apparently vile lump of animal texture, in the inner court of the temple of the body, the ark that contains the law, which keeps the genera unmixed, from age to age. How can you study this subject sufficiently?

But let us pass to other views. Let us go to look upon woman in the phases of her intellectual nature. If we scan her position amidst the ornate circles of a Christian civilization, it is easy to perceive that her intellectual force is different from that of her master and lord. I say her master and lord; and it is true to say so, since even in that society she is still in a manner in bonds; and the manacles of custom, of politics, or of bienséance not yet struck from her hands. She has nowhere been admitted to the political rights, franchises and powers that man arrogates to men alone. The Crown, when it rests on the brow of a woman, is always a political accident, grievous and deprecable; and even then, where woman reigns, man governs.