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 "Gynæcocentric 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.

In 1903, Weismann's theory of the continuity of the germplasm was ten
years old. De Vries' experiments in variation and Mendel's rediscovered
work on plant hybridization had hopelessly undermined the older notion
that the evolution or progress of species has taken place through the
inheritance of acquired characters--that is, that the individuals
developed or adapted themselves to suit their surroundings and that
these body-modifications were inherited by their offspring. As pointed
out in Chapter I, biologists have accepted Weismann's theory of a
continuous germplasm, and that this germplasm, not the body, is the
carrier of inheritance. Nobody has so far produced evidence of any trace
of any biological mechanism whereby development of part of the body--say