158 THE MENDEL JOURNAL 



seems to be a dominant hybrid, the female zygotic 

 composition may be represented as F f. But man, 

 the male, is pure with regard to maleness, and 

 since this is simply absence of femaleness, his zygotic 

 composition may be symbolically represented as / /. 



And with regard to the other type of sexual in- 

 heritance, that represented in certain insects where 

 the male seems to be the dominant hybrid, we have 

 already seen (compare Fig. 1) that the male somatic 

 cells carry one chromosome less than the female. In 

 other words, femaleness is due to the presence of 

 a chromosome absent in the male. In both types 

 of sexual inheritance, therefore, femaleness may be 

 said to be due to the presence of a factor absent in 

 the male, as recently pointed out by Professor Castle, 

 of Harvard University. 



We may, therefore, regard the female as of 

 more complex organisation than the male. And, 

 in that sense, the female may be said to be physiolo- 

 gically the superior sex. We may thus further con- 

 ceive that either the female is an extra -developed 

 male, and has arisen by the addition of a new 

 factor to maleness, or, perhaps more probably, that 

 the male has arisen as a defective variation from 

 the female. 



