312 Dynamic Theory. 



hungry, eager and active, and the male animal correspondingly restless, 

 unsatisfied, enterprising. They attribute an average longer life to the 

 female and cite cases of her greater size and power. They use the term 

 Anabolism to express these alleged general characteristics of the female 

 and the ovum, and Katabolism, to signify the downward tendency of the 

 male and the spermatozoon. They generalize from the numerous facts 

 they cite, that the essential condition of femaleness is anabolic and of 

 maleness katabolic, and that these distinctions constitute the principal 

 or only difference between them. I think this generalization is entirely 

 too sweeping and is not in reality true of the original essential qualities 

 of sex differentiation, but only of the subsequent incidents and accidents 

 attending it, and not nearly all of those. 



It is true that the ovum or female cell in the higher organisms is 

 composed of a nucleus surrounded by a comparatively large amount of 

 nutritive protoplasm. It is more passive and quiescent than the sperma- 

 tozoon or male cell. The latter is likewise possessed of a nucleus, but 

 the accompanying protoplasm is in small quantity, and part of it is in 

 form of a flagellum or tail, by which the cell is locomotive. ' Both the 

 male and female cells are chemically organized polar bodies with unsat- 

 urated affinities, and whenever they are brought within the influence of each 

 other, these unsaturated affinities draw them together ; but since by 

 their physical construction the male cell is more mobile than the female, 

 the former in many cases moves over the greater part of the space be- 

 tween them, and since the female nucleus is well within its surrounding 

 mass of protoplasm, the male nucleus can reach it only by penetrating 

 this mass. The wiggling of a tail in even a spermatozoon like muscular 

 exertion in an adult animal causes waste of tissue which is followed by 

 hunger or an unsatisfied chemism of the molecules of the tissue. This 

 hunger may be satisfied by the introduction of the spermatozoon to any 

 highly nutritive fluid for which it appears to have a powerful attraction. 1 

 But this hunger is not to be confounded with that other unsaturated 

 affinity which causes the spermatozoon bodily to fuse its nucleus with 

 that of the ovum, any more than the appetite which causes an adult 

 male animal to seek the female is to be regarded as the same as that which 

 causes him to seek his dinner. They are of a similar genus, but not 

 the same species. So then we are not to regard the activity of the male 

 cell in reaching the ovum as dictated by famine of the nutritive elements 

 and a hunger to recruit lost tissue. The hunger for each other is mutual; 

 the ovum surrounded as its nucleus is by a store of nutritive, protoplasm 

 is nevertheless as eager for the union as the spermatozoon and though 

 less active, is not passive. ' ' It frequently rises to meet the sperm in a 

 small attractive cone. ' ' 



1 See Geddes & Thomson, p. 125. 



