ON THE INFLUENCE OF MALE AND FEMALE PARENTS. 347 



I have attended to the numerous offspring of a single bull, or ram, or 

 horse, I have never seen any considerable difference in the number of 

 offspring of either sex. I am therefore disposed to believe that the sex 

 of the offspring is given by the female parent ; and the probability of 

 this seems obvious in fishes, and several other species of animals which 

 breed in water ; and though the evidence afforded by the facts adduced 

 is not by any means of sufficient weight to decide the question, it 

 probably much exceeds all that can be placed in the opposite scale. 



In oviparous animals, I have had reason to think the influence of the 

 female parent quite as great as amongst the viviparous tribes, though 

 my observations have been more limited and less conclusive. In vivi- 

 parous animals, the size of the foetus is affected by the influence of the 

 male parent, and, in some instances, not inconsiderably ; but the size and 

 form of the eggs of birds do not appear to be in any degree changed or 

 modified by the influence of the male, and therefore the size of the 

 offspring at the birth must be regulated wholly by the female parent ; 

 and this circumstance permanently affects the form and character of the 

 offspring. The eggs of birds, and those of fishes and insects (if such can 

 properly be called eggs), appear to resemble the seeds of plants, in having 

 their forms and bulk wholly regulated by the female parent ; but never- 

 theless their formation appears to depend on very different laws. For 

 the eggs both of birds and of fishes and insects attain their perfect size 

 in total independence of the male, and the cicatricula, the vitellus, and 

 the chalazse have appeared (I believe) to the most accurate observers, to 

 be as well organised in the unimpregnated, as in the impregnated egg : 

 in the seed, on the contrary, everything relative to its internal organisa- 

 tion appears dependent on the male parent. Spallanzani has, however, 

 stated, that many plants produced well-organised seeds, and even seeds 

 which vegetated perfectly, under circumstances in which it is not easy to 

 conceive how the pollen of the male plant or flower could have been 

 present. But the Italian naturalist appears to have blundered most 

 egregiously in his experiment; or (which I conceive to be more probable) 

 he became the dupe of the refined malice of his countrymen ; for I 

 repeated his experiments under very favourable circumstances, and with 

 the closest attention, but I failed to obtain a single seed. The gourd 

 alone produced apparently perfect fruit, and the seed-coats acquired their 

 natural size and form; and in this respect the growth of its seeds 

 appeared to be, like that of eggs, wholly independent of the influence of 

 the male. But the seed-coats of the gourd were perfectly empty, and I 

 could not discover, at any period of their growth, the slightest vestige 



