inheritance.  A superior male can impress his characters in a single year upon 100 times as many colts as a female of equal quality could produce in her lifetime.  So slight an incident in his life is this reproductive process for each individual that he could if he devoted his life solely to reproduction stamp his characters upon a thousand times as many colts as could a female.  Thus under artificial breeding conditions, the good males do have a tremendously disproportionate share in improving the whole breed of horses, though each single horse gets his qualities equally from his male and female parents.

Though Mendel knew an astonishing amount about inheritance a half-century ago, it is worth noting that the foundation upon which rests our present knowledge of sex has been discovered less than twenty years before—­the reference is, of course, to the chromosomes as the carriers of inheritance.  While from the standpoint of biology the opinions of two decades ago about sex literally belong to a different age, some of them have been so persistent in sociological thought and writings that they must be briefly reviewed in order that the reader may be on his guard against them.  Books which still have a wide circulation deal with the sex problem in terms of a biology now no more tenable than the flatness of the earth.

On the one hand were the ancient traditions of male predominance in inheritance, reinforced by the peculiar emphasis which animal breeding places upon males.  On the other hand, biologists like Andrew Wilson[5] had argued as early as the seventies of the past century for female predominance, from the general evidence of spiders, birds, etc.  Lester F. Ward crystallized the arguments for this view in an article entitled “Our Better Halves” in The Forum in 1888.  This philosophy of sex, which he christened the “Gynaecocentric Theory,” is best known as expanded into the fourteenth chapter of his “Pure Sociology,” published fifteen years later.  Its publication at this late date gave it an unfortunate vitality long after its main tenets had been disproved in the biological laboratory.  Germ-cell and body-cell functions were not separated.  Arguments from social structures, from cosmic, natural and human history, much of it deduced by analogy, were jumbled together in a fashion which seems amazing to us now, though common enough thirty years ago.  It was not a wild hypothesis in 1888, its real date, but its repeated republication (in the original and in the works of other writers who accepted it as authoritative) since 1903 has done much to discredit sociology with biologists and, what is more serious, to muddle ideas about sex and society.