weather, or both. Professor Key's investigations[10] have also
confirmed the well-known fact that maturity is reached earlier in
girls than in boys and have shown that in respect of growth the
ill-nourished girls follow the law of growth of the boys. Growth is a
function of nutrition, and puberty is a sign that somatic growth is
so far finished that the organism produces a surplus of nutrition to
be used in reproduction. Organically reproduction is also a function
of nutrition, and, as Spencer pointed out, is to be regarded as
discontinuous growth. The fact than an anabolic surplus, preparatory
to the katabolic process of reproduction, is stored at an earlier
period in the female than in the male, and that this period is
retarded in the ill-nourished female, is a confirmation of the view
that femaleness is an expression of the tendency to store nutriment,
and explains also the infantile somatic characters of woman. Finally,
the fact that polyandry is found almost exclusively in poor countries,
coupled with the fact that ethnologists uniformly report a scarcity
of women in those countries, permits us to attribute polyandry to a
scarcity of women and scarcity of women to poor food conditions.

This evidence should be considered in connection with the experiments
of Yung on tadpoles, of Siebold on wasps, and of Klebs on the
modification of male and female organs in plants:

According to Yung, tadpoles pass through an hermaphroditic
stage, in common, according to other authorities, with most
animals.... When the tadpoles were left to themselves,
the females were rather in the majority. In three lots the
proportion of females to males was: 54-46, 61-39, 56-44. The
average number of females was thus about fifty-seven in the
hundred. In the first brood, by feeding one set with beef,