CHAPTER IX. 



The Male-Cell or Spermatozoon. 



§ I. TJie Genei'al Contrast between Ovum and Spermatozoon. 

 — Just as the ovum, large, well nourished, and passive, is a 

 cellular expression of female characteristics, so the smaller size, 

 less nutritive habit, and predominant activities of the male are 

 summed up in the sperm. As the ovum is usually one of the 

 largest, the sperm is one of the smallest of cells. The yolk or 

 food-capital, and encysting membranes, which are often so pro- 

 minent in the former, are as conspicuously absent in the latter. 

 The contrast, though less accented, is still quite discernible in 

 plants. In fact, the two kinds of cells are just as widely op- 

 posed in their general features, as they are fundamentally com- 

 plementary in their history. Before this opposition and comple- 

 mentariness can be fully understood, however, we must briefly 

 sum up the characters and history of the male elements. 



§ 2. History of Discovery. — In 1677, one of Leeuwenhoek's students, 

 Hamm by name, called his master's attention to the minute elements 

 actively moving; in the male fluid. Leeuwenhoek, who some years pre- 

 viously for the first time observed what we now know as unicellular 

 organisms, was at once impressed by the import of the marvellously active 

 male units. Almost too much impressed, in fact, for he interpreted them 

 as minute preformed germs, which only required to be nourished by the 

 ovum to unfold into embryos. Thus the unfortunate aberration, already 

 noted as the doctrine of the animalculists, had its origin. For long no 

 progress whatever was made ; some naturalists, like Vallisneri, depreciat- 

 ing the import of the sperms altogether, and regarding them as worms 

 which hindered the coagulation of the seminal fluid; others going to the 

 opposite extreme, and regarding them as nests of germs. Thus Haller at 

 first considered them to be what Leeuwenhoek had suggested, but after- 

 wards admitted them merely as nativi Jiospites seniiiiis. In 1835, even Von 

 IJaer was inclined to interpret them as minute parasites peculiar to the 

 male fluid ; and if the curious student will turn up the article Eiitozoa in 

 Todd's Cyclopitdia of Anatoiiy and Physiology., of about the same date, he 

 will find that the veteran Owen includes the spermatozoa under that strange 

 heading. The very name spermatozoon recalls the view which so long 

 prevailed. 



In 1837, R. Wagner emphasised their constancy in all the sexually 

 mature males which he examined, and their absence in infertile male 



