Page:B20442294.djvu/42

 essential physiological similarities of two bodies, one with a male and the other a female diathesis. The second view recalls too vividly certain unfortunate speculations on heredity. Perhaps both views are equally far from the truth. At present empirical knowledge does not enable us to say wherein the masculinity or the femininity of a cell really lies, or to define the histological, molecular or chemical differences which distinguish every cell of a male from every cell of a female. Without anticipating any discovery of the future (it is plain already, however, that the specific phenomena of living matter are not going to be referred to chemistry and physics), it may be taken for granted that individual cells possess sexuality in different degrees quite apart from the sexuality of the whole body. Womanish men usually have the skin softer, and in them the cells of the male organs have a lessened power of division upon which depends directly the poorer development of the male macroscopic characters.

The distribution of sexual characters affords an important proof of the appearance of sexuality in different degrees. Such characters (at least in the animal kingdom) may be arranged according to the strength of their exciting influence on the opposite sex. To avoid confusion, I shall make use of John Hunter's terms for classifying sexual characters. The primordial sexual characters are the male and female genital glands (testes and epididymis, ovaries and epoophoron); the primary sexual characters are the internal appendages of the sexual glands (vasa deferentia vesicular seminales, oviducts and uterus), which may have sexual characters Jquite distinct from those of the glands and the external sexual organs, according to which alone the sex of human beings is reckoned at birth (sometimes quite erroneously, as I shall show) and their consequent fate in life decided. After the primary, come all those sexual characters not directly necessary to reproduction. Such secondary sexual characters are best defined as those which begin to appear at puberty, and which cannot be developed except under the influence on the system of the internal