SEX STUDIES. XI 9 
epithelium, surrounding a distinct lumen, and therefore impos- 
sible to be confused with either bloodvessels or nerves. 
The same condition of ducts was found in bird No. 1422, the 
bird sent from West Virginia with a record of treading hens. 
Everything else about the anatomy of this bird was that of a 
normal female—she laid eggs and showed no abnormal behavior 
after reaching Maine. The suspicion arose that these small 
non-functional vasa deferentia of the hermaphrodites might 
signify simply an embryonic condition,—that is, persisting 
Wolffian ducts—rather than maleness. Further, the fact of 
finding them present in 1422, otherwise a normal female, sug- 
gested the possibility of their beimg a normal feature of the 
anatomy of an adult female bird. In Lillie’s ‘‘ Development of 
the Chick” there occurs the following statement: ‘“‘In the 
female, the Wolffian duct degenerates; at what time is not 
stated in the literature, but presumably along with the Wolffian 
body.” The persistence of the ducts of the other sex in adult 
vertebrates is not an. unheard of phenomenon,—in fact, it is 
the normal condition in the common leopard frog for the Mul- 
lerian ducts to persist in the adult male. 
To work out this point, as to how long the Wolffian ducts 
persist in the female bird, dissections were made of a number of 
just hatched chicks and chicks from pipped eggs, seven of which 
proved to be females, and of five laying hens. All of them had 
Wolffian ducts. They were not as large as in the male—in 
fact, sometimes they looked like white threads along the peri- 
toneum lateral to the ureter at the posterior end, crossing it 
about half way between cloaca and gonad, and extending further 
anterior than the ureter near the midline to the remnants of the 
mesonephros. Sometimes they were as large as normal, but 
never had as many coils at the posterior end. Figure 7 is 
a dissection of one of the laying hens. ‘To be sure that this 
white line was not a nerve or bloodvessel, parts of it were sec- 
tioned in each bird. The columnar epithelial lining identified 
it unmistakably (figs. 8 and 9). Figure 8 shows the vas along- 
side of an artery, a vein, and the ureter. Each is easily identi- 
fied. These ducts show variation in structure. Sometimes 
