All this, no doubt, is extremely incorrect, yet may rest on a substratum of truth.
From the causes above mentioned, the maidans, both vioran and zeruan, having a considerable amount of leisure, were able to prosecute their higher education with even more assiduity than their busier brothers. In literature and art woman was, in fact, pre-eminent. Men, though by no means ignorant of, or indifferent to, the more graceful culture, showed generally a predilection for the exact sciences.
Distinguished artists would occasionally appear among the male sex, just as eminent geometers or scientists would among the women. But, as a rule, the whole range of the fine arts and of imaginative literature had long become the special province of the sex whose finer nervous organization gave a special advantage in those directions. Her powers of invention and execution had long ceased to be open to the sneering scepticism that seemingly expects from the one sex, amid many discouragements, and with little or no training, what appears only exceptionally from the crowded and well-trained ranks of the other,—that rare flowering of a union of natural endowment with resolute perseverance, to which is given the name of genius. Discussion as to the superiority of either sex would, to the contemporaries of Utis and Ulmene, have seemed as ridiculous as a question in regard to the greater necessity of one or the other. Their difference of mental endowment was recognized as one of quality, not of quantity. To compare them was as vain as the endeavor to strike a balance between a Cæsar and a Homer, a Newton and a Raphael, a Watt and a Shakspeare.
