A grand difference between plant and animal life lies in the fact that
the plant is concerned chiefly with storing energy, and the animal
with consuming it. The plant by a very slow process converts lifeless
into living matter, expending little energy and living at a profit.
The animal is unable to change lifeless into living matter, but has
developed organs of locomotion, ingestion, and digestion which enable
it to prey upon the plant world and upon other animal forms; and in
contrast with plant life it lives at a loss of energy. Expressed in
biological formula, the habit of the plant is predominantly anabolic,
that of the animal predominantly katabolic.

Certain biologists, limiting their attention in the main to the lower
forms of life, have maintained very plausibly that males are more
katabolic than females, and that maleness is the product of influences
tending to produce a katabolic habit of body.[1] If this assumption
is correct, maleness and femaleness are merely a repetition of the
contrast existing between the animal and the plant. The katabolic
animal form, through its rapid destruction of energy, has been carried
developmentally away from the anabolic plant form; and of the two
sexes the male has been carried farther than the female from the plant
process. The body of morphological, physiological, ethnological, and
demographic data which follows becomes coherent, indeed, only on the
assumption that woman stands nearer to the plant process than man,
representing the constructive as opposed to the disruptive metabolic
tendency.[2]

The researches of Düsing,[3] supplementing the antecedent observations
of Ploss,[4] and further supplemented by the ethnological data