500 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



For the sake of clearness, let us take the same occurrence on the 

 male side. In a germ-cell (whether ovum or spermatozoon or fertilised 

 ovum) predisposed to develop into a sperm-producer, a variation 

 arises, say, in the direction of briUiant pigmentation of the skin. 

 If it is consistent with the rest of the organisation, it is realised in 

 development; it is a success; all the spermatozoa have the corre- 

 sponding initiative factor, or gene, and it is transferred to a multi- 

 tude of ova. But it develops only in those fertilised ova which are 

 going to develop into males. It does so develop because it was to 

 begin with a variation — a new departure— exhibited by a male- 

 producing gamete. It is a seed which can germinate only in a male 

 soil, which will remain latent in a female soil. Thus a germinal 

 variation in those ova of the bee which develop parthenogenetically 

 into drones, will be unexpressed in the queens, but none the less 

 faithfully handed on by them, or rather continued by their egg-cells. 



We would, then, suggest the hypothesis, that distinctively 

 masculine characters all arose from variations in gametes predisposed 

 or predetermined to develop into males, that distinctively feminine 

 characters all arose from variations in gametes predisposed or pre- 

 determined to develop into females, and that this primal difference 

 in origin explains (i) why the new gains are often confined in their 

 expression to one sex, and (2) why they hang together in a hereditary 

 congeries. The hypothesis is in no wise inconsistent with the view 

 that many sex-characters are transformed species-characters, for 

 the new variation in such cases was the transforming. Nor does the 

 h>TX)thesis conflict in the least with the facts in regard to the 

 importance of hormones in the individual development of the sex- 

 characters, that is a question in the physiology of development. Nor 

 does the hypothesis conflict at all with the view that some process 

 of Selection favoured the persistence and diffusion of the new 

 characters. Nor does the hypothesis conflict at all with the view that 

 the sex-characters behave in inheritance as Mendehan characters. 

 The hypothesis concerns the origin, not the ontogenetic develop- 

 ment, nor the phylogenctic evolution, nor the mode of inheritance. 



One of the arguments that may be used in support of our hypoth- 

 esis is that used in a slightly different connection in The Evolution 

 0/ Sex {1889). It is this. There are numerous distinctively masculine 

 characters which have some measure of "family resemblance", 

 which look as if they had something in common, which are con- 

 gruent with the intenser metabolism of the male sex. To a thorough- 

 going Lamarckian this is readily intelligible, for he regards the 

 colour-display, the exuberance of integumentary outgrowths, the 

 erection of parts of the body such as crests and tail-feathers, 

 the growth of weapons on the one hand and embracing organs on the 

 other, as natural developments of the intensely living, lusty male, 

 as natural indix-idual developments, whose results have gradually 



