Page:Smithsonian Report (1898).djvu/522

440 but they have considered this question from the ontogenetic standpoint, if I may so express it; they have simply asked. "What conditions of the parents and what influences upon them lead directly to male or to female progeny"? In the above-mentioned work on genealogy the question is philogenetically treated, if I may thus again express it. The author raises the question, namely, whether inheritance is not of significance in the determination of sex; whether, to express it plainly, certain fathers or mothers, because of prominent deep-rooted peculiarities, are not destined to produce either wholly or chiefly either male or female offspring.

It is no idle fancy which our historian has brought forward for the statement and proof of this question; on the contrary, with astonishment one sees by an examination into this work on genealogy how the author has gone into the finest natural science problems of inheritance, into the subtilest phenomena accompanying creation and the beginning of sex, in order by thus bringing forward in support all available knowledge to give the greater value to his work.

The genealogical method here brought into use by the author is worthy the high consideration of biologists. He studied the genealogical history of numerous families of the nobility and found as a rule that in one, male, in another, female, descendants so predominate that the tendency toward inheritance of sex within a family can scarcely be called in question.

For further biological studies the following discovery resulting from genealogical investigations ought to be of significance: That in the human family the male element is of more weight in the formation of sex than the female.

Similarly other branches of knowledge that stand as aids to history e.g., diplomacy and paleography, the same is true also of archæology, have come to hold certain relations to the natural sciences. The study of the physical characteristics of old documents, of the substance written upon and the material used in writing, was undertaken earlier by the historians themselves. Now, microscopists of various special fields, foremost among them plant physiologists, have taken up this task; they cleared away old errors like the charta bombycina (paper made of cotton which is supposed to have preceded that made of rags), the charta corticina which proved to be papyrus, and many others, and traced the cloth or rag paper, so important to civilization, back to the eighth century of our era; whereas the historians could trace it only to the fourteenth century, and show that this paper was first invented neither by the Germans nor by the Italians, but was due to the oft illustrated inventive genius of the Arabs. Thus the history of paper was placed by the skillful work of plant physiology upon a new basis whose certainty, tested by the historical researches of the foremost historical and linguistic students, has met with fullest acknowledgment.

Plant physiology also rendered active assistance in the construction