110 Heredity, 



common to both sexes, and which we have occasionally 

 seen combined together by nature npon the bodies of 

 hermaphrodites, or evolved from the interference of art 

 upon a castrated male or a spayed female. 



^*In assuming at the age of puberty the distinctive 

 secondary peculiarities of his sex, the male, so far as 

 regards these secondary peculiarities, evidently passes 

 into a higher degree of development than the female, 

 and leaves her more in possession of those characters 

 that are common to the young of both sexes, and which 

 he himself never loses when his testicles are early re- 

 moved. These and other facts connected with the evo- 

 lution of both the primary and the secondary peculiar- 

 ities of the sexes farther appear to us to show that, 

 physiologically at least, we ought to consider the male 

 type of organization to be the more perfect, as respects 

 the individual, and the female as respects the species. 

 Hence we find that, when the female is malformed in 

 the sexual parts so as to resemble the male, the mal- 

 formation is almost ahvaysoneof excessive development, 

 and, on the other hand, when the male organs are mal- 

 formed in such a manner as to simulate the female, the 

 abnormal appearance is generally to be traced to a defect 

 of development. In tlie same wa}', when the female 

 assumes the secondary characters of the male it is either, 

 first, when by original malformation its own ovaries and 

 sexual organs are so defective in structure as not to be 

 capable of taking a part in the function of reproduction, 

 and of exercising that influence over the general organ- 

 ization which this faculty imparts to them; or, secondly, 

 when in the course of age the ovaries have ceased to be 

 capable of performing the action allotted to them in the 

 reproductive process. In both of these cases we observe 

 the powers of the female organization, now that its 



