The task still remains of examining many facts and theories already known which may apparently be contradictory to our teaching.
And here should be first of all taken into consideration the experiments in diet made by various stockbreeders (Bellingers, Wilkens, etc.). In them, however, the results of the analysis of the products of excretion are not given, and in particular there is no information respecting the combustible and useable sugar evacuated from the organism, or any other substances from the organism which might have been of importance for the evaluation of the food. It is possible that in experiments with diet, without reference to the excretion of sugar, the results may be sometimes in favor of the male and sometimes in favor of the female sex, upon which latter no active influence is exercised. Herr U. P., a nobleman resident in a country district of the Russian Baltic provinces, informed me by letter that in his herds the greater number of calves are born in February. The February calves are principally male. The cause in this case may be as follows:—Conception takes place in the May of the previous year. After having been kept some six months in the cow-houses, the beasts are turned into the spring meadows, and are impregnated at a period when metabolism is active in consequence of their altered mode of life. All the cows are in heat. The notable result obtained in the ensuing February may be explained as the consequence of the better physiological combustion of the food.
According to statistics more boys than girls are born in the years with a poor harvest. Bad harvest years are those which favor a flesh diet, as the food-stuffs from the vegetable kingdom do not suffice for the cattle, nor for the people either; in consequence of which the cattle are killed, and more flesh enters into the diet of the women who are fructified. If people in general had the normal aptness for procreation in such famine years, the flesh-diet might turn the scale in favor of the male sex; it being presupposed that the other conditions were fulfilled.
If Thury’s law be considered, Thury also held the ripeness of the ovum to be of importance for male or female ova. The ova were regarded by this author, as being more or less ripe, or as male and female, according to the time, whether it happened to be at the beginning or at the end of the rutting. To me, however, the ripeness seems to depend upon the process of physiological combustion in the organism of the mother. According to Thury no attention need be paid by us to the ripeness for fructification, as this ripeness is attained independently of our interference. But, on the other hand, our influence has the effect of producing a male ovum out of the ovule ready to be fructified.
If the dieting of a woman in the way we recommend is practicable and of definite effect upon the development of the future sex, we arrive at a conclusion which may be summed up as follows:—If a woman be dieted according to our method, she can reach a stage in which she becomes sexually superior to the man, and her offspring will then be male, in accordance with the law of the cross-heredity of sex.
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