THE NATURAL 



The abundance of food, especially nitrogenized 

 (? azotized) will produce a greater number of females. 

 With certain animals at transformation one may act 

 directly on individuals: tadpoles gorged on mixed food, 

 vegetables, larvae, chopped meat, have given an excess of 

 females approaching totality (95 females to 5 males). 

 On the other hand over-feeding tends to abolish stamens 

 in plants, the stamens turn into petals, suralimentation 

 even moults the petals into leaves and the buds into 

 shoots. Richness of means, well-being, intensive feeding 

 abolish sex, but the last to be affected is the female, 

 which in sum, perseveres obscurely in the unsexed plant, 

 forced back to its primitive means of reproduction, or 

 to reproduction by slip cutting. If excessive alimenta- 

 tion tends to suppress the male, it would then appear 

 that the separation into two sexes is a means of diminish- 

 ing the costs of the total being. The mono.ic type is 

 a step toward this simplification of labour; the female 

 at a given moment eliminates her male organ, refuses 

 to feed it, frees herself from the burden which has only 

 a momentary utility. And, following this, provided in 

 herself with an overabundance of all that maintains life, 

 she divests herself of the specialized sexual apparatus, 

 unsexes herself, that is to say, the identity of contraries 

 being here evident, she is sexed throughout all her parts: 

 tola femina sexus. 



The male is an accident: the female would have 

 sufficed. Brilliant as are, in certain animal species, the 

 destinies of the male, the female is primordial. In civil- 

 ized humanity she is born in proportion greater as the 

 civilization approaches a greater plenitude; and this 

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