32 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
femaleness are merely a repetition of the contrast existing between the animal and the plant. The katabolic animal form, through its rapid destruction of energy, has been carried develop- mentally away from the anabolic plant form ; and of the two 3 the male has been carried farther than the female from the plant process. The body of morphological, physiological, ethnological, and demographic data which follows becomes coherent, indeed, only on the assumption that woman stands nearer to the plant process than man, representing the con- structive as opposed to the disruptive metabolic tendency. 1
The researches of Diising, 2 supplementing the antecedent observations of Ploss, 3 and further supplemented by the ethno- logical data collected by Westermarck, 4 may be regarded tenta- tively as having demonstrated a connection between an abun- dance of nutrition and females, and between scarcity and males, in relatively higher animal forms and in man. The main facts -in support of the theory that such a connection exists are the following : Furriers testify that rich regions yield more furs from females and poor regions more from males. In high alti- tudes, where nutrition is scant, the birth rate of boys is high as compared with lower altitudes in the same locality. Ploss has pointed out, for instance, that in Saxony from 1847 to J 849 the yield of rye fell and the birth rate of boys rose with the approach
elaborate form. The present paper is an attempt to extend the general thesis to the human species, with a suggestion of its social implications.
1 HAVELOCK ELLIS, Man and Woman, 1894, nas brought together a mass of very valuable material on the question of the somatic and psychic differences of man and woman, but aside from some very sane remarks in their proper connection, has made no attempt to generalize his materials. H. CAMPBELL, in a volume of much the same scope, Differences in the Nervous Organization of Man and Woman, 1891, has given a re"sum of the theory of Geddes and Thomson, and suggested its extension to the human species, but without attempting to work out the application in detail.
a C. DiisiNG, Die Regulirung des Geschlechtsverhdltnisses bei der Vermehrung der Menschen, Thiere, und Pflanzen, 1884; Das Geschlechtsverhaltniss der Geburten in Prcussen, 1890.
3H. PLOSS, "Ueber die das Geschlechtsverhaltniss der Kinder Bedingenden Ursachen," Monatsschrift fiir Geburtskunde und Frauenkrankheiten, Vol. XII, pp. 321-60.
<E. WESTERMARCK, The History of Human Marriage, 1891, pp. 470-83.
