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 

 production and maintenance of sex-characteristics in the the organs 

 female, and the functions appertaining to them, I shall ge^ion* 1 

 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 



