The Lunarian Professor and His Remarkable Revelations Concerning the Earth, the Moon and Mars / Together with An Account of the Cruise of the Sally Ann

by James B. Alexander

“But what was the secret you told us?—I am anxious to learn at once, lest some accident shall forever bar my opportunity.”

“Well the secret is the simplest thing in the world, and your scientists have been reproaching themselves all over the earth for not having discovered it themselves. In fact, as they say, they did discover all around it when they lit upon the “Option of Sex.” It is simply the conditions for the production at will of the Third Sex.”

“The Third Sex!” I echoed in amazement.

“Yes the Third Sex. I prefer that name, though some have called it the neuter sex, others name it the Double Sex, or the Epicene or Common Sex, others the Hermes-Aphrodite. In some respects it is all of these, or either, or neither. But it is at any rate Third. I am not going to give you the recipe,” said he, “for if I do, when you leave here, and now and go back to the Nineteenth Century, you will be sure to let out the secret prematurely by two hundred years. But I can say that the development of the third sex is in reality no development at all, but an arrest of development, at a particular prenatal period. If you are informed in the science of embryology, you know that in the earliest stage of the embryos of all sexual animals, the sex is not determined, and at that stage there is nothing to distinguish whether the coming individual is to be male or female. It possesses possibilities of either and therefore the germs of both. At a second stage the elements of the essential organs of both sexes are developed in each individual and then the individual is both male and female, but not fully matured or developed. At the third stage the organs distinguishing one of the sexes are carried forward to functional perfection, while those pertaining to the other, are not developed any further, and in some cases are partly undone again. Now if the developement of the embryonic sexual organs be arrested during the second stage of growth or before it, the individual will be neither male nor female, but will belong to the third sex. The manner in which this arrest can be accomplished is the secret we imparted to you 20 years ago, and by means of which the important problem of the control of population can be solved by you as it was long ago done by us.”

“Then you have the three sexes in the moon?”

“We have had them for many ages, in fact, we would not know how to exist if we had but two.”

“It is a wonder to me how you ever could have fallen upon so wonderful an arcanum—that nature seems to be carefully hiding from us.”

“Nature dropped the hint in this as in so many others of our discoveries. There were occasional examples of the third sex produced by nature and born into life, as there have been in the case of the human race as you must know. These examples excited curiosity, which led to the discovery, that they were due to arrested development. Further investigation and experiment showed this arrest to be due to deprivation of a certain class of food, or rather of food in a certain dynamic condition, that is, under certain electric tensions. This condition again depends on the molecular structure of the food elements. When the food is deprived of the constituent plastidules[2] required for the nourishment and development of the tissues composing the embryo organs of sex; these tissues do not mature. And since the emasculation or invalidation of the food does not extend to, or affect the process of assimilation of the same nourishment by the other tissues, such as muscle, brain, nerve, bone, etc., the individual is built up to a symmetrically sexless maturity. And the development of sex is said to be arrested.

“If your people had been as wise as the bees they would have known how to produce the third sex simply as the bees do by supplying the appropriate sort of nutriment; for they, from the same sort of an egg, produce either a queen, a drone or a worker, the latter being of the neuter or third sex; simply by variations in the food and treatment.

“It is said, that it was by observing and following such hints as these that our ancestors learned how to produce the same results the bees have accomplished.”