SUPPOSED INFLUENCE OF OTHER CONDITIONS 27 



taken part in the propagation of the race, it would follow that those who 

 returned in safety showed a unisexual tendency in the male direction. 



That a tendency of this sort could be produced in one man by the 

 mere death of another is a notion that hardly needs to be refuted. If 

 such an effect is real, it would therefore have to be the result of priva- 

 tions and other evils suffered in war, and not of the mere destruction of 

 life, a process which Nature is carrying on all the time. The question 

 would then be whether privations and sufferings generally produce a 

 male unisexual tendency. This idea seems to be conclusively nega- 

 tived by the fact that the male preponderance is not shown to be a 

 function of the wealth of the country, or the condition of the great 

 mass of the population. 



Nevertheless, in order that none of my conclusions might be based on 

 a priori reasoning, and in order to answer the objection that there may 

 be something peculiar in the effect of privations suffered in war, which 

 differentiates them from other privations, I have examined the popula- 

 tion statistics found in the New York census for 1865, and the United 

 States census for 1870, enumerating the sexes of children who, from 

 their ages, must have been born about the close of the civil war. In 

 the case of the United States census I confined the examination to the 

 Southern States, because there it was that the suffering and privations 

 were the greater. The result, comprising enumeration of the sex of 

 more than 100,000 children, showed that the male preponderance was 

 as nearly as possible the normal one, and that not the slightest influence 

 of the war could be detected. 



It has also been maintained that the practice of polygamy has been 

 found productive of the unisexual tendency in the female direction. 

 The data for deciding this question are insufficient; but I find that, in 

 the only region of the United States where such an effect would be 

 likely to be observable, there is the usual preponderance of male births. 

 Analysis will show that this proposition also belongs to the most im- 

 probable class. The only polygamous practices which could reasonably 

 be supposed to affect sex are so far from rare that any unisexual tendency 

 arising from it would be brought to light by a very slight examination. 

 The author believes that the preceding paper contains sufficient matter 

 to disprove the supposition, without the necessity of further inquiry. 



