Third, The period of excessive exertion having passed, and the number of ewes in heat being diminished, the ram also found less weakened, the procreation of males in majority again commenced."
In order to show that the cause of such a result is isolated from all other influences of a nature to be confounded with it, he gives the details of his observations in a year when the number of births of males and females were about equal. He also goes on to say, that, "at the end of each month all the animals at the sheepfold are weighed separately, and thanks to these monthly weighings, we have drawn up several tables from which are seen the diminution or increase in weight of the different animals classed in various points of view, whether according to age, sex or the object for which they were intended.
Two of these tables have been appropriated to bearing ewes—one to those which have borne and nursed males and the other to those which have borne and brought up females. The abstract results of these two tables have furnished two remarkable facts.
First, The ewes that have produced the female lambs are, on an average, of a weight superior to those that produced the males; and they evidently lose more in weight than these last during the suckling period.
Second, The ewes that produce males weigh less, and do not lose in nursing so much as the others.
If the indications given by these facts come to be confirmed by experiments sufficiently repeated, two new laws will be placed by the side of that which Giron de Bazareingues has determined by his observations and experiments. On the one hand, as, at liberty, or in the savage state, it is a general rule that the predominance in acts of generation belongs to the strongest males to the exclusion of the weak, and as such a predominance is favorable to the procreation of the male sex, it would follow that the number of males would tend to surpass incessantly that of the females, amongst whom no want of energy or power would turn aside from generation, and the species would find in it a fatal obstacle to its reproduction. But, on the other hand, if it was true that the strongest females and the best nurses amongst them produce females rather than males, nature would thus oppose a contrary law, which would establish the equilibrium, and by an admirable harmony would secure the perfection and preservation of the species, by confiding the reproduction of either sex to the most perfect type of each respectively."
FOOTNOTES:
[19] Philosophical Transactions, 1809.