256 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 
Throughout the work referred to, it is over and over again 
stated that the female is the outcome and expression of 
preponderant anabolism, and the male of preponderant 
katabolism. But it is at once evident that a cell or an 
organism with preponderant katabolism must very soon die. 
We, Fellows of this Society, are male organisms, but, as we 
hope to live, we certainly cannot believe ourselves the 
victims of preponderant katabolism. This, of course, was 
not what the authors intended to suggest. 
It is rather this—that if in a female organism the amount 
of anabolism (storage of potential energy) and of katabolism 
(dissipation of potential energy) be contrasted by the ratio 
= and if in a male organism of the same species the same 
: Zieh eee ee 
sum of vital processes be contrasted in a similar ratio we 
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then the ratio = will be greater than the ratio i> greater 
during growth because the female in the same time grows 
larger, greater during maturity because the female gives 
away a larger amount of reproductive material. 
In the same way, to take another illustration, it is quite 
likely that the amount of anabolism for a given period of 
time is greater in the bird than it is in the tortoise, and it 
is, we should suppose, certain that the amount of katabolism 
for the same period is much greater in an active bird than 
in a sluggish tortoise, but the only satisfactory contrast is 
between the ratio = in either case. 
It is this conception of a contrast of ratios which appears | 
to us a necessary correction of the general thesis of “The 
Evolution of Sex.” 
: One of the most important 
recent contributions to the biology of sexual reproduction is 
to be found in a paper entitled “The Origin of Sex through 
Cumulative Integration, and the Relation of Sexuality to the 
Genesis of Species,” read in 1890 before the American 
Philosophical Society by Mr John A. Ryder. In this 
elaborate paper, which covers fifty pages of small type, there 
are many brilliant suggestions and speculations, the effect of 
which we cannot but feel to be somewhat blurred by the 
