292 The Living Plant 



plants, but in animals also, including man. With man, indeed, 

 the principle that the female is the receptive and protective 

 element, and the male the aggressive element, is not limited to 

 physical structure alone, but shows its influence in some of the 

 profoundest facts of his actions, thoughts, laws, and social cus- 

 toms. 



At this point the reader may demur to this explanation of sex 

 on the ground that it seems too superficial for the profundity of 

 the phenomena. But one should take care not to extend to all 

 Nature conceptions derived alone from mankind, where all sexual 

 matters are vastly exaggerated in apparent importance by socio- 

 logical considerations. In Nature at large sexual differences are 

 prominent rather than profound. Even in plants that are highest 

 in the evolutionary scale, sexual differences never affect the plant- 

 structure very far away from the pistils and stamens; and all of 

 the remainder of the bulk of the plant has nothing whatever to do 

 with sex, but is strictly nonsexual or asexual. Even the occasional 

 cases, described by the term dioecious, where one plant bears only 

 pistils and another only stamens, is no real exception, though we 

 often describe these plants, very naturally, as male and female 

 respectively. The individual, therefore, in plants is sexual only 

 in limited spots, it is never sexual as a whole. The same is true 

 of the simpler animals, but in the more highly organized species 

 it is somewhat different, for in them each individual bears only 

 one kind of sex cells, and has only one kind of sex organs; while 

 the high specialization of these parts affects somewhat the whole 

 individual so that we distinguish male and female individuals. 

 But even in mankind the structural differences between the sexes 

 are insignificant as compared with the structural resemblances 

 between them. 



Whatever else my discussion of sexual reproduction may have 

 meant to the reader, it will at least have demonstrated this, that 

 sexual reproduction is a far more complicated process than 

 asexual, involving the construction and manipulation of adapta- 



