SEX OF THE F(ETUS. 149 



the father of medicine teaches that both in animals and in the human 

 species, the right testicle and the right ovary produce male germs, 

 while female germs come from the left; this opinion of the ancients, 

 without having ever been generally adopted, without having ever 

 been fortified by a single direct experiment, has nevertheless passed 

 down for ages, and claims even in our day some partisans, even 

 among learned physicians. However, admitting the fact, one great 

 difficulty would still remain to be got over in applying it. How 

 shall the seminal matter of the right gland, rather than that of the 

 left, get into the womb, and vice versa? In quadrupeds indeed it 

 would be possible to take away from one the right and from another 

 the left prolific gland; but what man would submit to such a muti- 

 lation for the sake of being able to procreate a boy rather than a girl? 

 Another expedient was evidently necessary; and Millot has gravely 

 advised the couple to lie, during a fruitful copulation, on the side 

 where the germ of the sex they desire to have is found. We might 

 to a certain extent excuse the ancients, who believed that the human 

 uterus was two-horned like that of brutes, for entertaining such an 

 opinion, for believing that the semen of the right ovary would per- 

 haps stop in the right horn, provided the two individuals took the 

 precaution of lying on the corresponding side during the coition; 

 but in the nineteenth century such conjectures are merely subjects 

 for ridicule, and scarcely deserve the trouble of refutation. 



387. Moreover, it is actually demonstrated that the basis of this 

 hypothesis is entirely false. Legallois caused rabbits from which 

 he had removed one ovary to be covered, and found that it did not 

 prevent them from engendering young of different sexes; as to the 

 human species, without mentioning the cases of men who having 

 lost one of the genital glands have notwithstanding procreated both 

 boys and girls, I will relate two facts that are decisive on this subject. 

 A woman died some years ago at the Maternite at Paris; she was 

 the mother of ten or twelve children of both sexes, and neverthe- 

 less her sexual organs were so disposed, that there was only one 

 ovary and one tube attached to the corner of a womb which was 

 itself reduced to one of its halves. In the case by MM. Jouvet and 

 Garnier, communicated to the Academy by M. Ollivier (d' Angers), 

 it appears that the woman had been confined five times; that she 

 had had four boys and one girl, that the first four pregnancies seemed 

 to have been effected in the left uterine sinus, and the fifth and last 

 only in that on the right side. Lastly, all naturalists know that, in 

 animals, where the uterus is completely bi-lobated, the same horn 

 is often filled at the same time with both male and female foetuses. 

 388. While doing justice to these suppositions, physiologists 

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