DETERMINATION AND INHERITANCE OF SEX 541 



hundred. The great majority of these are largely unscientific, the 

 result mostly of philosophical speculation or a priori opinion. As 

 examples of such it was supposed that an egg from the right ovary gave 

 rise to a male and an egg from the left ovary to a female ; that the sex 

 of the offspring was like that of the younger or more superior parent; 

 the exact opposite of the latter, that the sex was that of the weaker or 

 older parent; or that the younger or more vigorous parent determined 

 the opposite sex in the offspring; and many others involving equally 

 off-hand assumptions. That the sex of the offspring is that of the 

 weaker parent has been recently advocated again and statistically ap- 

 parently well supported by Dr. Romme, a well-known physiologist of 

 London. In further support of his theory he cites the fact that among 

 barbarous nations continually at war there is always a preponderance 

 of boys over girls. 



Professor Schenck's famous sex-theory is in essence the same. He 

 proposes to increase the physical vigor and the number of the red blood 

 corpuscles in a person when it is the wish to beget a child of the opposite 

 sex. Renewed interest has been aroused in this theory, due to Professor 

 Schenck's connection with the royal family of Russia, where he put his 

 principle to the test with an apparently successful result when the 

 Czarina gave birth to the desired son. But Professor Simon Newcomb, 

 as the result of a very extensive statistical investigation, concludes that 

 " it seems in the highest degree unlikely that there is any way by which 

 a parent can affect the sex of his or her offspring." 



Within the last decade students of the problem of sex have become 

 very generally agreed that sex is inherited. In other words, they believe 

 that the same mechanism that provides that an offspring shall have one 

 or the other of a pair of contrasting characters represented in the two 

 parents (a long sharp nose or a short stubby nose, for example) provides 

 also that the animal shall have either the sex of the mother or that of 

 the father. The problem of sex seems to be part and parcel with the 

 general problem of inheritance. Furthermore, characters of the parents 

 are believed to be inherited by the offspring according to Mendelian 

 principles. And it can be shown, as was done by Dr. Castle, of Har- 

 vard University, in 1903, that sex may be regarded as the result of a 

 Mendelian segregation, dominance and inheritance of sexual characters. 

 And now it becomes incumbent to explain Mendelian inheritance be- 

 fore continuing the discussion of the problem of sex, seeing that sex 

 appears to be inherited in Mendelian fashion. 



Mendelism is the term employed to designate a set of phenomena 

 that appear when animals or plants with sharply contrasting characters 

 (white flower petals and colored petals; gray fur and white fur; short 

 stature and long stature; sagacity and stupidity; etc.) are crossed. 

 The principles included under the term Mendelism were first discovered 



