which Darwin dismisses so lightly as something belonging to savage epochs,
is to Buckle the sign of a quality which he holds essential, not only to
literature and art, but to science itself. Go among ignorant women, he
says, and you will find them more quick and intelligent than equally
ignorant men. A woman will usually tell you the way in the street more
readily than a man can; a woman can always understand a foreigner more
easily; and Dr. Currie says in his letters, that when a laborer and his
wife came to consult him, the man always got all the information from the
wife. Buckle illustrates this at some length, and points out that a woman's
mind is by its nature deductive and quick; a man's mind, inductive and
slow; that each has its value, and that science profoundly needs both.

"I will endeavor," he says, "to establish two propositions. First, that
women naturally prefer the deductive method to the inductive. Secondly,
that women, by encouraging in men deductive habits of thought, have
rendered an immense though unconscious service to the progress of science,
by preventing scientific investigators from being as exclusively inductive
as they would otherwise be."

Then he shows that the most important scientific discoveries of modern
times--as of the law of gravitation by Newton, the law of the forms of
crystals by Haüy, and the metamorphosis of plants by Goethe--were all
essentially the results of that _a priori_ or deductive method "which,
during the last two centuries, Englishmen have unwisely despised." They
were all the work, in a manner, of the imagination,--of the intuitive or
womanly quality of mind. And nothing can be finer or truer than the words
in which Buckle predicts the benefits that are to come from the
intellectual union of the sexes for the work of the future. "In that field
which we and our posterity have yet to traverse, I firmly believe that the
imagination will effect quite as much as the understanding. Our poetry will