324 GENERAL ORNITHOLOGY part n 



that out of myriads a score or so may gain their end. It will be 

 seen that they have a long journey to accomplish ; for, liberated in 

 the cloaca of the female, they have to swim through the whole 

 length of the oviduct to the ovary. Besides such physical differ- 

 ence between the male and female DynamamcebcB as I have indicated, 

 they differ in their place and mode of birth ; and in this difference 

 lies the very gist of sex. The original indifferent genital gland 

 above described, arrested, as said, at a certain stage of development 

 and therefore female — the ovary — produces its eggs from its surface- 

 cells, which subside into the ovarian tissue, and are quietly packed 

 away there as ovarian ova, ready to ripen and awaken to impreg- 

 nation in due course. The same gland, further developed into a 

 testis, gives active birth to the spermatozoa in the tubules of its 

 complicated interior tissue. In the former case, the superficial cells 

 slowly ovulate ; in the latter, the cells lining the interior speedily 

 spermate ; in a word, the testis is as literally viviparous as is the 

 ovary oviparous — and these conditions are certainly no insignificant 

 indices of relative development in the scale of being. The spermatozoa 

 appear in some animals to be set free in myriads from the walls of 

 the seminal tubules whence they directly issue ; in birds, they are 

 described as appearing coiled or otherwise packed in delicate sperm- 

 cells, which speedily rupture and discharge the creatures in the 

 current of the seminal fluid, where they take up the course and 

 display the energetic actions above noted. Either case has its 

 parallel among ordinary Protozoans ; the former corresponding to 

 the process of budding or gemmation, the latter to that of interior 

 fission and discharge of numerous progeny by rupture of the en- 

 velope. The final conjugation of spermatic filaments with ovarian ova 

 is simple fusion, such as any ordinary sexless amoeboid animal may 

 practise to blend its protoplasmic substance with that of another. 

 But there is this difference, that in the case of Dynamamxba it is a 

 true sexual congress, usually polyandrous, and still more of a one- 

 sided affair in that the female Dynamarrmha is at the time in a more 

 or less quiescent encysted state. 



Female Organs of Generation. — The connection between the 

 male and female organs of generation is naturally so close that in 

 what has preceded it has been scarcely possible to speak of the 

 former without reference to the female counterparts. I have thus 

 far endeavoured to state clearly the nature of the originally sexless 

 genital gland ; the difference in the same gland when afterward 

 sexed male or female ; and the character of the spermatic offspring 

 of the male gland. In reading that lesson the novice in such 

 Eleusinian mysteries must not mistake the language I have used to 

 describe the male Dynamamaba, or spermatozoon, as applicable to any- 

 thing in the development of the female Dynamamceba, or ovum, into 



