attempted example. For the elevation of the spirit, the body must be kept under subjection, and the devotee, who would approach the mysteries of the Unseen God, must crucify the flesh and the lusts thereof. The ancient Egyptian, the Buddhist, the Brahmin, the Zoroastrian and the Hindu all emphasise the same truth; and many Christians have still to learn that Christianity has bonds of sympathy, aye, and identical phases of religious thought, with these seekers after the divine. Now it may appear paradoxical, when I remark, that in respect of the subordination of the animal or strictly materialistic senses, the unbeliever in the highest truths of Christianity has arrived at a greater degree of practical effort and a higher standard of living faith than the believer; and has moreover developed what may be called the extra senses to a more advanced stage than the members of Western civilisation. The Anglo-Saxon is but on the threshold of the study of the occult sciences; he has only the vaguest glimmering of what is meant by the ultimate triumph of mind over matter; of that gradual growth and evolution of things temporal into things eternal; of the absorption of the mortal in immortality. The Eastern adepts of occult physical and metaphysical philosophy have for untold ages studied, unremittingly, the hidden forces of nature; and by remorselessly eradicating the lower passions of pride, avarice, sensuality, selfishness, love of ease and comfort, and the pleasures of appetite, have acquired knowledge and powers that might be the inheritance of the majority of mankind, if the race would diligently develop the spiritual nature at the expense of the animal. Western scientists, as regards hypnotism, animal magnetism, electro-biology, the relations between body, soul, and spirit, the subtle mysteries of affinities, the physical phenomena of the elements, and the most profound researches after hidden natural laws, are as yet only on the borderland of discovery. The materialised intellect, distinguishing Western study, is prone to look upon the spiritual forces of nature, and of man in particular, as so many metaphysical subtleties unworthy of logical interpretation; physiologists not having grasped the fact, that outside their own limited area of knowledge, there may be natural laws of stupendous potentiality of whose existence they have hardly the slightest premonition; and undoubtedly, the advance of Western scientific discovery, great as it has been in many branches, has been retarded in several impor

tant particulars, by this prejudiced attitude of the leading scientists. Hypnotism, mesmerism, clairvoyance, second-sight, auto-telepathy have been relegated to the charlatans and quacks; their well-attested phenomena ridiculed as idle tales, and credited to hysteria, deception, and even dishonest agencies. It has lately been proved by uncontrovertible gruesome facts, that possibly two in every thousand persons are annually buried alive, owing to the great ignorance still existing in the medical profession regarding the phenomena of coma and certain phases of trance and catalepsy. Women are especially exceedingly prone to fall into these various forms of suspended animation; and some authorities on the subject are bold enough to aver, that the patients are undergoing the rest-cure of nature. Catalepsy, in fact, is a form of hypnotic trance, and is a natural method of combating disease from nervous exhaustion; it should therefore in nowise be interfered with. What again was the rapt condition of the mystics of the Middle Ages than a complete subjection of the body to spiritual influences? Scoffers may ridicule their ghostly visions and transcendent exaltation as spectres of a disordered fancy, and hallucinations of an unhealthy nervous system; but the fact remains unexplained, that the mystic in his bare cell, starved, sick, weary, and suffering, was upheld in his self-imposed martyrdom by a joy, a rapture, and a spiritual consolation, lifting him far above all earthly considerations. Having made, once for all, the supreme surrender of self, the way, it seemed, lay open to that fuller, higher life which brought compensation for everything lost in this world. To the mystic of that and every age, the unseen world is in truth the real world. The things of sense are as if they exist not; the things spiritual are clear, plain, palpable, all-sufficing. Earth, with its sordid cares and anxieties, sinks out of sight, and is lost in the rapturous vision of the illimitable glories of Heaven.

Now it is remarkable that European women are much more susceptible to occult influences than men. "All the phenomena which of old were termed 'magical' come under the group here termed 'hypnotic,' and they have always been regarded as especially connected with women. Pliny tells us that women are the best subjects for magical experiences. Quintilian was of the same opinion. Bodin estimated the proportion of witches to wizards as not less than fifty to one.' "Man and Woman," Havelock Ellis.

This testimony to women's "superhuman" powers is exceedingly valuable in conjunction with the advanced scientific opinion, that the child and the woman approximate nearest to the higher line of evolution; they foreshadow, as it were, the future development of the race. Now somnambulism or sleepwalking in any marked degree is almost exclusively confined to children of both sexes and to young girls. The best subjects for mesmeric and hypnotic experiments are always found among women; not from any inferiority of will-power, as is often cynically suggested, but because they possess sympathetic receptivity, and physical adaptability to meet the exigencies of a new force. The seers and possessors of second-sight in Scotland are invariably women; the clairvoyant of the mesmerist is again invariably a woman; and it appears to me, that women are probably nearer to the acquirement of the higher physiological and psychic development than men, solely because their bodily appetites are kept so much more in abeyance; and they are thus in a condition better adapted to the impression and assimilation of a novel suggestion, based on the maturer evolution of a natural law.1 As Western Science advances along this fruitful plane of thought and research, women will, undoubtedly, be found the best subjects for experiment and investigation.

Maeterlinck thus recognises this attribute in woman. "Woman is more amenable to fate than man, and never fights sincerely against it. She dwells closer to the feet of the inevitable, and knows better than man its familiar paths. Hence it is chiefly in communion with woman that the average man enjoys a clear presentiment' of that life which does not always run on parallel lines with our visible life, and it is often a woman's kindly hand that unlocks for him the portals of mystical truth."

We will now take the sense of smell into consideration. This is, without contradiction, a purely animal function, the sense of smell in the brute creation having arrived at a perfection of acuteness and accuracy far greater than that developed in man. No human being tracks like a bloodhound, nor scents dangers as a timid deer; but in comparison with the relative proportion of the sense possessed by both sexes, men retain the greater acuteness and delicacy of smell. In America in 1886 experiments were performed on eighty-two persons of

1 See Note 4.

different sexes, and the above conclusion was strictly investigated and satisfactorily proved. At the present stage of man's development the more rapid decadence in woman of an animal instinct acts in two ways-beneficially and deleteriously.

In the great scent gardens and manufactories in France, Germany, and other countries, women are exclusively employed in gathering the flowers, and in performing that portion of the manufacture of perfumes in which the inhalation is at the strongest, as men are found to be incapable, till after a long apprenticeship, of standing the ordeal without turning sick and faint. Again, in the fœtid haunts of the destitute, women, sisters of mercy, hospital nurses, district visitors, are found plying their charitable tasks, some of the most loathsome character, undeterred by the foulness of an atmosphere that often incapacitates a young doctor or priest from remaining any appreciable length of time. In hospitals it is found that women-nurses become inured and partly indifferent to the peculiar and disgusting exhalations unhappily accompanying various forms of disease and surgical operations, and which turn the medical student sick as he bends over the sufferers. Thus deficiency in the sense of smell enables women to perform many distasteful tasks, that otherwise would upset and enfeeble their loving and competent ministrations.

On the other hand, with matter still often in the wrong place, it is obvious a keen sense of smell detects unerringly where dirt lurks concealed, where exudes the foul gases and the noxious vapours. When practical chemistry and more advanced hygienic laws have relegated to its proper functions all the waste matter of civilisation, and our homes, streets, and cities are clean and pure, every sanitary law fulfilled, then women may pride themselves in being able only to differentiate between a rose and a lily; but till that much-wished-for consummation, it would be as well to husband and utilise, in the observance of cleanliness and the detection of dirt, the small modicum of the olfactory sense that still remains to them.

In the opinion of many philosophic scientists, as the race progresses intellectually it will deteriorate in mere physical beauty. Exceptionally clever men and women are seldom remarkable for good looks or perfect features, and character of face and intellectual mobility of expression now interest and charm more than beauty of outline. During the long

*

ages that man has been the selector he has ever sought his ideal beauty in woman, and thus among all races, irrespective of colour, there is a widely-spread diffusion of female physical charms, more apparent among the more civilised Aryans than any other. It is the exception at the present day to find among Europeans a repulsively ugly young woman; the type has been raised by sexual selection to so high a standard that women, who, if they had lived in past centuries, would have been celebrated beauties, pass now unnoticed in the crowd. Women have attained to this normal height of physical beauty, "because men have combined to make them fair," and it is probable that the beauty of women will increase rather than diminish, though developing on more intellectual and spiritual lines than hitherto.

'Summing up all the agencies at work among the higher races as fruitful of increasing female beauty, we may well assume its further great development. These influences are men's devotion to it, women's lessened labour and ease, their higher education, and their social development. These conditions must produce in turn romantic love, vigour of body, and maintenance of youthful appearance, amiability of expression and the intellectual and spiritual graces of countenance; all of which, in the aggregate, will mean even now and still more increased beauty for the future."-"Heredity, Health, and Beauty," J. V. Shoemaker.

The higher development of their intellectual faculties have therefore had no deleterious effect upon women's physical charms. We do not find that study renders our "sweet girlgraduates" at Girton, Newnham, Oxford, and Cambridge bald; while in America, statistics regarding the Female College of graduates prove that the highly educated girl is well up to the average in physical health, and performs her special feminine function in the production of healthy children as much up to the standard as those of ignorant mothers. In fact, the superb physique of Anglo-Saxon girls is the universal comment of other nationalities; and muscular development, with increasing height of stature, is fast becoming a racial characteristic. Out-door pursuits, lawn tennis, golf, and other healthful exercise, have largely, of late years, contributed towards this result, and thus demonstrate a simultaneous advance of both mental and physical qualities in the majority of highly-civilised women. Now both experience and observation show, that with men, in the highest civilised state, we