The 'one animal in all creation about which man knows the least'.
[Perspective article]
Biologists today absorb evolutionary perspectives in worlds very different from that inhabited by Charles Darwin while he was writing The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Women then did not attend universities or participate in formal scientific meetings. It was 1945 before a woman, other than its patron Queen Victoria, was admitted to the Royal Society. Well might a scholar of that era have taken for granted that a man will attain ‘a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain—whether requiring deep thought, reason or imagination’[1, Part II: 327]. Females of his species had few opportunities to demonstrate otherwise. The determinate event in the lives of most women of his acquaintance would have been choosing, or being chosen by, a man of means.
