The Facts of Sex in Relation to Metabolism. 261 
kinds of cells, the most primitive or ancestral of which was 
poorly provided with cytoplasm, while the secondary form 
was provided with a thick cytoplasmic envelope.” 
“The primitive, minute form of cell is to be identified as 
the asexual one, which afterwards became ‘ male,’ while the 
large, overgrown type of cell, loaded with cytoplasm and its 
secondary products, is to be identified as ‘female, or as a 
cell on the way towards disruption into male cells, which 
tendency it still betrays in the process of extrusion of polar 
bodies. The arrest of this process of fragmentation in the 
case of such large cells loaded with cytoplasm, led to the 
evolution of the ovum from the spermatogonium, or such a 
cell as was primarily destined to produce male cells as a 
result of its further fission.” 
“The male state is therefore the primitive one, and in the 
prodigious fertility of the male represents the primordial, 
asexual, flagellate types. The female cell is a secondary and 
derived form, developed after a cytoplasmic field has been 
evolved, and after cell-aggregates began to become coherent.” 
[To all this it must be said that it is extremely hypo- 
thetical. 
It is an hypothesis that the primitive units were 
bacteria-like. _ 
It is an hypothesis that in them chromatin prepon- 
derated over cytoplasm, and this is an unlikely 
supposition if chromatin be the end-product of 
cytoplasmic metabolism. 
It is an hypothesis that chromatin is a product of the 
metabolism of cytoplasm. 
It is a confusion of thought to speak of these primitive 
asexual units as “male,” for the term is purely 
relative, and has no meaning apart from its 
correlate “female.’’| 
So far, then, Ryder’s most important conclusions are—(1) 
that in the male reproductive cells chromatin preponderates, 
in female reproductive cells cytoplasm; (2) that the primor- 
dial asexual units were like male cells in having preponderant 
chromatin, and that the male state is the primitive one; (38) 
