INTRODUCTION 3 



Professor Thomson, and repeated in all subsequent Reason why 



,... apologia is 



editions : necessary. 



" A third reason why the problem of the origin of male 

 " and female has been so much shirked, why naturalists 

 " have beaten so much about the bush in seeking to 

 " solve it, is that in ordinary life, for various reasons, 

 " mainly false, it is customary to mark off the repro- 

 " ductive and sexual functions as facts altogether per se. 

 " Modesty defeats itself in pruriency and good taste 

 " runs to the extreme of putting a premium upon 

 "ignorance. Now this reflects itself in biology. Re- 

 " production and sex have been fenced off as facts by 

 " themselves ; they have been disassociated from the 

 " general physiology of the individual and the species. 

 " Hence the origin of sex has been involved in special 

 " mystery and difficulty, because it has not been 

 " recognized that the variation which first gave rise to 

 " the difference between male and female, must have 

 " been a variation only accenting in degree what might 

 " be traced universally." 



Apparently, and unfortunately, a quarter of a century 

 has hardly been a period long enough to effect the 

 change in our outlook that is surely coming. 



In discussing the normal factors responsible for the Correlated 



,.. , .. , ..-.., functions of 



production and maintenance of sex-characteristics in the the organs 



female, and the functions appertaining to them, I shall 



cover a wide field and one which has only recently been 



opened to our view. Hitherto attempts to describe the 



special correlated functions of the hormonopoietic organs, 



or, to be more exact, of the internal secretions, appear 



to have been avoided by those who have worked most 



at the subject. Correlations have been admitted, points 



in support of them have been adduced, and the matter 



has then been dropped. In many ways this is much to 



be deplored, for to some extent it is accountable for 



the present disordered state of our knowledge. It is 



disappointing, for instance, to read through a work such 



as that of Biedl on Internal Secretion, and nowhere to 



find an attempt to link up if only from an analysis of 



