Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/476

458 are of the rough-and-ready type still to be met with in English country districts—men who have picked up their knowledge in the course of practice, and are better qualified to treat the diseases prevalent in simple than in more advanced communities.

VI. The " male cells are always more anarchic, usually mature before the female elements, and even in plants, and in such passive animals as a sponge or a hydra, burst from the organism, while the female cells remain in situ" It is in accordance with all organic evolution that the male leads and the female follows. Male birds earlier migrate. The first Greek emigrations were exclusively of the male sex. Even the organized colonization of Cyrene was womenless. The northern invaders, having fighting to do, were solely men. No women went out with the first expeditions to!New Spain. There were few women in early Virginia. There were few in New France for long, nuns excepted. The two colonies sent out to Darien consisted respectively of twelve hundred and thirteen hundred men. It is males that are wanted in a new country. Only men could fight the battle the early colonists have to fight; hampered by women, they would fight it worse or not at all. Heroines like the wives of La Tour, Dupleix, and many an unknown settler are equal to men, but women of a softer stamp suffer greatly and eventually succumb.!Nor are they imperatively required; there are native women for the first immigrants, who are not as a rule squeamish. As the conditions assimilate to those of older countries, the proportions change. In a newly settled pastoral country the males are as ten to one. In older pastoral countries complicated with newly discovered mines, like West Australia, they are still as two to one. The emigration to New South Wales in 1831-'37 was of one hundred males to thirty females. The emigration from Great Britain at this day continues predominantly male, but only in the proportion of ten to seven.

VII. The age of the reproductive cells must be left in the obscurity in which it lies. Parent birds migrate before the young, but it is probably the more active and the less old of these that are the first to leave. The law remains operative to the last. The first emigrants are fighting or toiling men at their best. As colonial life grows easier, older and younger members of families join the stream. In rare cases an aged father and mother are brought out by a son who has thriven. Still (if observation may be trusted), nine tenths of emigrants are under forty-five, and two thirds of them are under thirty-five. Manhood in its prime and womanhood in its bloom form the core of all emigration. White heads are singular in youthful communities.