Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/69

 A* DIFFERENCE IN THE METABOLISM OF THE SEXES 55

cent, excess of boys in the first year, and 3 per cent, in the years between I and 5. In the intra-uterine period and at the very threshold of life the mortality of males is still greater. The figures of Wappaeus were 100 stillborn girls to 140.3 boys; Quetelt gave the proportion as 100 : 133.5 I and the statistics of 14 European countries during the years 1865-1883 show that 130.2 boys were stillborn to every 100 girls. 1 So that while more boys than girls are born living, still more are born dead. That this astonishingly high mortality is due in part to the somewhat larger size of boys at birth and the narrowness of the maternal pelvis is indicated by the statement of Collins of the Rotunda Lying-in Hospital, Dublin, that within half an hour after birth only I female died to 1 6 males; within the first hour 2 females to 19 males, and within the first 6 hours 7 -females to 29 males. 2 But that this explanation is not sufficient is shown by the fact that a high mortality of boys extends through the whole of the first year, and through five years, in a diminishing ratio, and also that the tenacity of woman on life, as will be shown immediately, is greater at every age than man's except during a period of about five years following puberty. "There must be," says Ploss, "some cause which operates more ener- getically in the removal of male than of female children just before and after birth," 3 but besides the more violent movement of boys and their greater size no explanation of the cause has been advanced more acceptably than Haushofer's teleological one, quoted by Ploss, that nature wished to make a more perfect being of man, and therefore threw more obstacles in his way. A satisfactory explanation is found if we regard the young female as more anabolic, and more quiescent, with a stored sur- plus of nutriment by which in the helpless and critical period of change from intra- to extra-uterine conditions it is able to get its adjustment to life. The constructive phase of metabolism has prevailed in them even during fetal life. That there is need of a surplus of nutrition in the child at birth, or that a surplus

1 PLOSS, he. cit. t Vol. I, p. 207. 3 PLOSS, loc. fit., Vol. I, p. 206.

ELLIS,/*-. /., p. 377-