still more recent past. Attention has been focused on a few great males.
For example, the breed of American trotting horses all goes back to one
sire--Hambletonian 10. The great Orloff Stud Book, registering over a
million individuals, is in the beginning founded on a single horse--a
male. It is not strange that we still find among some breeders vestiges
of the ancient belief that the male predominates in 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