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(4) Particular Feminine Qualities.
Section 70. (a) Intelligence.

Feminine intelligence properly deserves a separate section. Intelligence is a function that has in both sexes some basis and purpose and proceeds according to the same rules, but the meaning of intelligence must be abandoned if we are to suppose it so rigid and so difficult to hold, that the age-long differences between man and woman could have had no influence on it. The fundamentally distinct bodies, the very different occupations of both sexes, their different destinies, must have had profound mutative influence on their intelligence. Moreover, we must always start with a difference of attitude in the two sexes, in which the purely positive belongs to one only, and we must see whether it is not intensified by the negative of the other. When one body presses on another the resulting impression is due, not only to the hardness of the first, but

also to the softness of the second, and when we hear about the extraordinary wit of a woman we must blame the considerable idiocy of the men she associates with. How many women are to be trusted for intelligence, is a question of great importance for the criminalist, inasmuch as right judgment depends on the attitude and good sense of the witnesses, and must determine the value of the material presented us.

We wish to make no detailed sub-divisions in what follows. We shall merely consider in their general aspects those functions which we are accustomed to find in our own work.