l8o THE PLANT WORLD. 



benefit of the student of sociology. From the genetic point of 

 view, sexes in plants bear some relation to the prehuman phase 

 of sociology, which in turn has led up to the human society of 

 to-day. So it is well worth our while to consider this matter 

 of the sexes from the botanical point of view. 



Surely Mr. Ward is wrong in the presentation of his theory 

 when on page 313 of his " Pure Sociology," after citing the popu- 

 lar notion that an organism that brings forth young must be fe- 

 male, he writes : " Biologists have proceeded from this popular 

 standpoint, and regularly speak of ' mother cells ' and ' daughter 

 cells.' It therefore does no violence to language or to science to 

 say that life begins with the female organism and is carried a long 

 distance by means of females alone." The statement may do no 

 more violence to language than does the saying, '' the sun sets," 

 but such use of language does great injustice to science and does 

 not justify the last sentence in Mr. Ward's paragraph, viz., 

 " In a word, life begins as female." Nor can we subscribe to the 

 first statement on page 314, which runs thus: "The female sex, 

 which existed from the beginning, continues unchanged, but the 

 male sex, which did not exist at the beginning, makes its appear- 

 ance at a certain stage, and has a certain history and develop- 

 ment, but never became universal." Such a distortion of the facts 

 regarding the evolution of the sexes should not go unnoticed, and 

 Mr. Ward has been fairly well answered by Hall and Wilson in 

 their articles in " The Independent," March 22, 1906. But w^e are 

 constrained to wonder whether we might not, with Empedocles, 

 Spinoza and others, bridge over the chasm, if such exists, between 

 the organic and the inorganic worlds, and also carry the female 

 sex back into the inorganic world. And again we are not so 

 sure that, were we to follow the philosophers in ascribing a 

 psychic phase to inorganic life, it might not be more reasonable 

 to see, in afifinity and repulsion, the essence of two sexes even in 

 inorganic nature. 



Regarding sexes in plants, as given in the " Pure Sociology," 

 we find on page 314 the following: " The simplest type of sexu- 

 ality consists in the normal continuance of the original female 

 form with the addition of an insignificant and inconspicuous male 



