April 1892.] THE BOTANICAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH. 405 



daughter-cell, then it is erroneous to speak of the male 

 animal as katabolic as long as it has not reached maturity, 

 and therefore, also primary, and many secondary, sexual 

 characteristics cannot be the outcome of katabolism. 



To prove in a similar way that the female is not an 

 anabolic organism is not possible, as the authors suppose a 

 female to be living considerably below its income, but 

 although it cannot be proved directly that the female 

 does not owe its female characters to preponderant ana- 

 bolism, still we may, I believe, justly infer that if katabolism 

 be not the factor producing maleness, that neither will 

 anabolism produce femaleness, as both anabolism and 

 katabolism, femaleness and maleness are, according to the 

 author's views, antithetic. 



Is it possible that the authors, notwithstanding many 

 sentences to the contrary, meant to convey as their con- 

 viction, that the female was relatively more anabolic than 

 the male ? 



Take man again as an illustration. We could suppose 

 two foetuses to exist in their fourth month, having exactly 

 the same weight, and becoming simultaneously differentiated 

 into a male foetus, M, and a female foetus, F. If, further, 

 an equal amount of food-material be assimilated by both M 

 and F, then according to the supposition of the relative ana- 

 bolism of F, with each successive month and year, say up to 

 an age of twenty years, the difference in weight and bulk 

 between M and F ought to become more and more marked. 

 If we resolve the anabolic F into its units, we would find 

 that greater relative anabolism in a cell means that it will 

 grow to a greater size than a corresponding cell of M would. 

 Two possibilities suggest themselves to me : either such an 

 enlarged cell must divide at a quicker rate than the relatively 

 katabolic M-cell to keep its size within certain limits, corre- 

 sponding to those of M, or if the rate of division in M and 

 F be the same, then with each successive division the cells of 

 F must result in two daughter-cells larger than those of the 

 corresponding division in M. 



Whatever possibility we take into account, it is obvious 

 that, owing to the enormous number of generations of cells 

 intervening in the period of twenty years, an originally 

 exceedingly small difference in relative anabolism would be 



