Mr Brooke's incomprehension of women

There are some good lines in Middlemarch. The three that have amused me the most concern Mr Brooke's incomprehension of women.

Chapter 4
Mr Brooke wondered, and felt that women were an inexhaustible subject of study, since even he at his age was not in a perfect state of scientific prediction about them! Here was a fellow like Chettam with no chance at all.

In short, woman was a problem which, since Mr Brooke's mind felt blank before it, could be hardly less complicated than the revolutions of an irregular solid.

Chapter 6
'Your sex are not thinkers, you know - varium et mutabile semper - that kind of thing. You don't know Virgil, I knew' - Mr Brooke reflected in time that he had not had the personal acquaintance of the Augustan poet