192 DR. F. WOOD-JONES ON THE 
the region of nature superstitions; but this has not yet effected a 
complete elimination from works on popular natural history of 
the imaginative accounts given by the older authors. 
The apparent enormous preponderance of the males thrust 
itself upon the attention of Etienne Geoffroy (St. Hilaire), and to 
him is due the credit of placing on a firm scientific basis what 
was at the time a complete mystery to the scientific man and a 
subject of superstition to the ignorant (1). The work of Geoffroy 
was published in 1829, and, looking back, it seems a wonderful 
thing that this man, who with scalpel and forceps made clear all 
the essential facts, produced, in this respect, so little impression 
upon the succeeding generations of naturalists that all the old 
inaccuracies and traditions were repeated regularly in successive 
works on natural history. 
_ Jn writings on the natural history of the Mammalia, for at any 
rate another seventy years, English authors were contented with 
a repetition of the popular stories concerning the numerical 
inequality of the sexes, and the supposed elimination of the 
superfluous males in the fierce contests of the pairing season. 
Briefly, Geoftroy discovered by his investigations that although 
young moles all appeared to be males when the examination was 
confined to the external appearances of sex, yet, on dissection, 
some of these seeming males proved to be females in possession 
of well-developed internal female genitalia. Such a finding was 
indeed remarkable, but still the mole was by no means an isolated 
example of external sexual anomaly; for other cases of the 
difficulty, or even impossibility, of distinguishing the sex of 
mammals by mere external examination were already well 
known. But Geoffroy went further than this, for he showed 
that this peculiarity was limited to some females, and that 
although some appeared outwardly to be males, others, like the 
normal females of most mammals, possessed a vaginal orifice. 
In some females an organ almost exactly similar to the penis of 
the male alone existed, and in others there was an added orifice 
situated between the penis and the anus. This vaginal orifice he 
recognised as being a new formation in those females which 
possessed it; he assumed that this new orifice existed only after 
pairing, and he supposed it was actually produced by the efforts 
of the male in the act of copulation. It would be imagined that 
merely to call attention to this very unusual state of affairs would 
have been sufficient to attract a large army of anatomists and 
zoologists to the field of investigation, and yet but little attention 
seems to have been given to the subject. Indeed when, ten 
years later, Thomas Bell wrote his article on Insectivora, he opens 
his account of Zalpa by saying “the female organs in the mole 
offer some peculiarities which deserve more attention than they 
have hitherto received” (2). Bell's account is obviously based 
upon the work of Geoffroy, and it is well to quote it in full. ‘In 
the first place, it appears that in this animal the urinary and 
genital orifices are wholly distinct. The clitoris, which is of 
