356 The Morality of Nature 



repeat all its ancestral constructive work, re-endowed with 

 the duplex constitution. Some mysterious cause has reduced 

 the cells to germs; has endowed one germ, the sperm, with a 

 nucleus of male activity, and the other, the egg, with a cyto- 

 plasm of unexpended female nutrition; and between them 

 appears an affinity as of acid for a base, or as the positive 

 for negative electro-force. 



Now this difference constitutes the sex functions of all 

 sexual living things, from the most primitive, where sex 

 begins, up to the highest orders known. The process is 

 alike in the sea urchin, in the worm ascaris, and in the human 

 being, in its essential features of cell maturity, cell reduction 

 and cell union. 



Everywhere the germ cell arriving at maturity develops 

 these singled, less complete forms, which are male and errant 

 under some circumstances; probably those of activity and 

 difficulty ; or female and dormant under other circumstances, 

 generally when environment is abnormally inviting. This 

 mode of reproduction prevails, however, not because it is 

 the sole possible mode, but because it has proven so advan- 

 tageous in comparison with all others, that it has well nigh 

 displaced them in the forms of somatic organization of life, 

 by survival in greater fitness. Its first advantage is doubt- 

 less in the specializing of the functions of the two sexes, a 

 mere division of labor. 



We see its great distinctions from the simpler conjuga- 

 tion and redivision, to be twofold — firstly it achieves a 

 fundamental reduction of the chromosomes which, upon 

 reunion, causes not a single redivision but a historic reminis- 

 cent development — and secondly it promotes and prefers 



