Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/739

 THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE SEXES IN THE UNITED STATES IN 1890.

proportionate number of the two sexes in any community exercises important and subtle influences upon its economic and social life. The rawness and roughness of frontier and mining settlements are in some degree effects of the excess of men, while excess of women in many a factory town has effects which would doubtless be quite as marked, if the disparity in the number were as great.

The problem of the numerical proportion of the sexes is to be investigated primarily by the statistical method. But sex is a phenomenon not peculiar to the human race; on the contrary, it extends nearly through the organic world. Hence, the problem is not one to be solved by the sociologist alone; the aid of the biologist must be invoked. It is probable that the phenomena of sex throughout the organic realm are subject to certain common influences of a biological character. If there are, as there doubtless are, supplementary forces also at work upon the human species determining the proportion and distribution of the sexes, the existence and extent of such forces can be accurately determined only after the amount to be ascribed to purely biological forces has been ascertained and deducted. It is biological forces which must account for the fact that in every considerable community the number of the two sexes born is approximately equal, but with a slight excess of males. On the average rather over 51 per cent, of the children born are boys, and rather less than 49 per cent, are girls. It is also primarily, but not entirely, to biological forces that the slightly larger proportion of deaths among males in the course of a year must be attributed. For the difference in the death rates of the sexes is most marked in early infancy, when such social causes as the greater exposure of males to dangers of all sorts would exert no