Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/164

152 has actually taken place in many cases, and that, in nearly all cases in which the sexes differ in peculiarities not actually concerned in reproduction, the male has varied more than the female. The amount of variation which any organism has lately undergone may be learned in two ways—by a comparison of allied species, and by a comparison of the adult with the young. In a genus which comprises several species the characteristics which these species have in common are due to heredity from a common ancestor, and are therefore older than features which are confined to any one species. Now, it is a well-known ornithological law that the females of allied species of birds are very much more alike than the males, and that in some cases where the females can hardly be distinguished the males are very conspicuously different—so much so that there is not the least danger of confounding them. Countless examples will present themselves to anyone who is at all familiar with birds, and those who are not can at once find ample proof by glancing through any illustrated work on ornithology—Gould's "Humming-Birds," for example.

The greater variability of the male is also shown by a comparison of the adult male and female with the immature birds of both sexes. Since the growing animal tends to recapitulate, during its own development, the changes through which its ancestors have passed, substantially in the order in which they first appeared, it follows that, in cases where the sexes are unlike, the one which is most different from the young is the one which has varied. Now, it is only necessary to compare the nearly full-grown young of our domestic fowls with the adult cock and hen, to perceive that the adult hen agrees with the young of both sexes in lacking such male characteristics as the highly ornamented tail-feathers, the briliantbrilliant [sic] plumage, the distended comb, the spurs, and the capacity to crow. Countless similar illustrations might be given to show the great tendency of the male to vary, but the above are sufficient for the purposes of our argument. As both sexes usually retain the more general specific and generic characteristics, and are alike as far as these are concerned, it is a little more difficult to show the conservative constitution of the female than it is to prove the male tendency to vary. Among the Barnacles there are a few species the males and females of which differ remarkably. The female is an ordinary barnacle, with all the peculiarities of the group fully developed, while the male is a small parasite upon the body of the female, and is so different from the female of its own species, and from all ordinary barnacles, that no one would ever recognize, in the adult male, any affinity whatever to its closest allies. All of the hereditary race characteristics are wanting: the limbs, digestive organs, and most of the muscles and nerves have disappeared, as they are not needed by a parasitic animal; and the male is little more than a reproductive organ attached to the body of the female. It is only when the development of the male is studied that we obtain any proof of its