Omaha Daily Bee Newspaper, June 11, 1916, Page 26

Wiy War Basies May 8 More Orren Bovs v GiRLs - Dr. Woods Hutchinson Explains How Science Accounts for ‘the Remark- able Apparent g Effort of - Nature to Replace the | Men Lost in o Battle By Dr, Woods Hutchinson The World's Foremost Physician-Author. ONII of the most unexpected war re- sults comes in the recent an- nouncement from England of e distinct and apparently growing increase in the number of boys among the hables born withing the last three months. Whereas the general average for the past ten years bad run about 1,026 boys to each 1,000 girls, the rate took a4 jump in the first quarter of last year to 1,082, second quarter to 1,042 and the third t6 1,066, This is not a very huge increase, only about two per cent, but it seems to be progressing, and is, trom the militarist’s point of view, in the right direction. Apparently it is calculated to do something to redress that terrible and bitterly lamented surplus of females in modern communities, of W] ‘we have heard 8o much in mr:.ont b ly in recent mon n%h well, first, to ex- an 8| t contra- the melan- This 1s ugh there ‘more females than males in the entire population, the number of boy uflu and gilx;l :IMQI t to birth singylar] early ::::th with an almost invariable slight surplus of boys. This surplus, however, or the fuur , part of it, disappears very early In life, Bt easioal sad.soatomicel Tonson ful but ana that boy bables have larger heads than girl bables—due, of course, to their su- perior mentality (?)—and hence more of them die in the process of birth, And at every successive decade of life the really sterner and superior sex takes increasing advantage of the defenseless male, and wears him down and survi im in ever increasing proportion. So that it is to be feared after all, the lus fo- males will get the better of it the war, in spite of this modest increase in the proportion of (defenseless boy babies. This is not by any means the first re- corded {nstance of an apparent attempt on the part of nature to redress dis- turbance in the balance of the sexes caused by war. An increase in the pro- portion of male births has been reported, in a crude and general way, from a wide varlety of both races and continents, not merely after war, but also after famines and devastal pestilences. Much of been put down to loose popular rumor of the “wish is father to the thought” varlety. And considering the fact that really complete and well kept and reliable records of all the births in & country scarcely come into existence until the last fifty or sixty years—our own birth rates in these United States are still only about seventy per cent complete— there is small chance of flnding any ac- curate and reliable data either in support or disproval of this popular claim. But there are a fow instances which come within the range of modern vital statistics, notably the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, in which the records in Prussia (and, curiously enough, also in Paris) show a slight but distinct in- crease in the percentage of male births in the first 8ad second years following the _ war. A rimilar though slighter increase was forad after our own Civil Wer. And now comes this unquestioned slight in- crease of male babies in Engl . Several explanations have been offered for this purzling phenomenon, first and most popular of all the mental impression one. According to this the mind of the :K:cunt mother (only males have been d in battle) is almost certain to be fixed with bitter grief and eager longing upon the memory of some husband, ther or son who has fallen, and this and constant mental influence in some mysterious manner condi- and determined the sex of the un- t this n gives us little light bears up poorly under analysie. First, the reason that history is full of, and our own personal experiences include, of fnstances where the keenest and longing, not merely of a year & mother’s whole lifetime, son to bear the name or e, with the result only of ! another, until the law and of equal sex birthe steps the situstion, if it ever does. upon women and children than they do upon adult males. So that as a matter of fact there are usually more women and girl children lost in the havoc of war than men. Already the women and child victims by starvation, exposure, disease and massacre in Belgium, in Poland, in northern France, in Armenia and Serbia equal if they do not outnumber the ter rible totals of the casualty reports of all the armies. And there is no valid reason why the bereaved mother should grieve more deeply and sincerely over her lost sons and brothers than over her lost sisters and daughters. There Is only one suggestion and that a tentative one, which can be advanced toward olearing up even a part of the mystery.. This comes from the work that has recently been done, largely by Amer- foan scientists, upon the possible deter- mination of sex in the ova or eggs of var- fous insects, fishes, frogs and birds. Forms in which the eggs can be hatched or caused to be developed outside of the body and hence under conditions where every stage of their development can be carefully observed and studied. They have bx no means solved the mys- tery of the determination of sex, but two things have been determined with a falr degree of clearness. One that an astonishing and most constant equality between the sexes in numbers born runs '.hrw&h almost every division of the animal kingdom and is apparently based upon & curious law of “‘odd and even" like the tosses of the dice. All the germ cells of one sex, usually the female or ova, are exactly alike, while the germ cells of the opposite sex, or sperms, are of two kinds, which we will odd and even. To put it very roughly, if an even sperm first reaches and mates with an ovum, the result will be a female; it an odd sperm it will be a male. And as by a “splitting” proce: hich can only be ex- plained in mo ppallingly technical terms, odd sperms and even sperms are produced in exactly equal numbers, the chances of an “odd” combination and an “oven" combination are exactly equal. 8o whenever the births count up into the thousands, this equality shows itself with absolute constancy, as has long been found in the male and female births of our own species. Never more difference between them than three or four in the hundred save for brief periods, and when twenty or more years in succession aro taken not more than ten or fifteen in the thousand. ( To guard against a wrong impression, it should be stated that while in the ma- jority of the different forms of animals from frogs and insects up, studied in this manner, it is the female cells or ova which are all alike, and the male cells or sperm which are of two different kinds, in some forms of animals, notably birds, the con- dition is reversed. The male cells are all ;l’::(do and the female cells of two different s, This, of course, would at first sight ap- pear to put the control of sex in any form or degree utterly and hopelessly beyond our power. For it reduced the question of maleness or femaleness to a purely mechanical problem of mathematical chances, which of two sperms identical in every respect except oddness or ev:n- ness, shall first reach and fertilize an ovum; both kinds of sperms being pro- duced in exactly equal numbers, Aad there can be little question that this 1 the actual state ‘of affairs in the vas:, overwhelming majority of instances. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, male and female are produced alternately in precisely “fifty-fifty” proportions, as surely and as inescapably as numbers counted in succession will come odd wnd oven alternately. The sexes are litera'ly Experiments Have Shown That the Matter of Food and Its Assimilation Has a Marked Effect in Some Animals Upon the Determination of Sex. The Photograph Shows One of the Extraordinary Three- Headed Frogs Which Were Produced by Dr. Roux, the Dis- tinguished French Scientist, in His Brilliant Series of Experiments for Determination of Sex in Frogs. born in pairs, regardless of what we do or don’t do, as regularly as our eyes or our ears or our hands are. But there are exceptions to every rule, and evidence is gradually beginning to accumulate that while this remorseless equality of the sexes always obtains un- der normal conditions, under abnormal end exceptional conditions this balance may be upset, and one sex produced in much greater numbers than the other. It has, for instance, long been known among certain forms of insects, which produce many broods in a season, that through the Summer when food is abund- ant and weather conditions favorable, males and females are born in equal numbers. But when Autumn comes on with cold and storm and a scarcity of food supply, the broods show & large preponderance Copyright, 1916, bv the Star Colhplni: Great Britain Rights Reserves of one sex, sometimes females, but more commonly males, It has also been known that by feeding frogs upon unusual or speclally stimulating and nutritious food, like meat, thelr eggs when batched would show a large preponderance of one or the other sex, usually the female, \ But when these instances were care- fully studied out by a number of inde- pendent observers, the results were curi- ously variable and even confilcting. It seemed impossible to decide what one in- fluence was the cause of the changes and there was a strong suspicion that in some cases the sexes were born in equal numbers, but that one was killed off much more rapldly by cold or wet or starvation than the other. So that by the time they were, 8o to speak, big enough to count, this sex would have almost disappeared. But of late years, after and out of Conditions Like THIS: P————T T A Boy Baby, Like THIS, Says Science, May be the Direct Result ofl Peasants of Northern France Fleeing from the Invading Germans. The Upsetting of the Normal State of Society Causes a Disturbance of the Mother’s Normal' Physical Processes, Which, in Its Turn, Upsets the Balance of the Sexes, Thus Produc- ing in Sterner Times a Majority of the Sterner Sex. scores of unsuccessful attempts to change or control the proportions of the sexes, four or five positive successes have been recorded by scientists, not merely com- petent, but of high standing and under the most careful and exact laboratory condi- tions, In one of these Hertwig, of Munich, one of the highest authorities in ° the embryological world, took two batches of frogs’' eggs, or ova, One of these he fertilized at once by sprinkling sperms over them, and these hatched out tadpoles in the proportion of fifty males to fifty females. The other batch, however, he allowed to stand for several days in the watery part, or serum, of frog's blood, until they soaked up water and became overripe. Then he fertilized them with sperms as before and succeeded in pro- ducing tadpoles in proportion of eighty males to twenty females, Three years later one of his assistants repeated the experiment and so success- fully that he was able to obtain in some batches one hundred per cent of males, and, of course, no females at all. Some three years ago a very skilful and gifted American embryologist, Miss King, at the Wistar Institute, in Philadelphia, repeated the Hertwig experiment, only she reversed it, that is to say she dried the eggs instead of letting them waterlog themselves, and with results to corre- apond, namely, ninety per cent of females, while undried and untreated batches showed the usual fifty-to-fifty proportion. Obviously from these three findings the male would appear to be the “sappy” sex. It would be perhaps too much to hope that further researches along this line might throw some ray of light upon the profound and mysterious differences between men and women in their craving for flulds and liquors of all sorts. Pos- aibly men are compelled to vote “wet” by their basic chemical composition, and women to vote “'dry” for the same reason. Just recently Whitney, of Wesleyan University, has succeeded in controlling the proportion of males in the low form of worm, the rotifers, by feeding. A curl- ous feature of this experiment was that he had In the famous words of Oliver Wendell Holmes about the prevention of disease “to begin with the grandparents.” By feeding the grandmother generation upon a particular green infusorian, he could increase the proportion of males in the grandchild generation from 6 per cent to 80 per cent, Evidently' while the famous ‘proverb “It's no use teaching your grandmother to suck eggs” may hold good among the rotifers, it is 'of great practical import- ence if she can be taught to eat green in- fusiorians. Finally another eminent American em- bryologist, Whitman, by a prolonged and most extensive and laborious study upon igeons, which he bred and kept by hun- s for six or seven years, cut short by his lamented death, was able to distin- guish two types of eggs—ome with a smaller yolk and larger percentage of water, which would usually hatch a male, o and another larger and richer in fat which would produce a female. It has also long been held by cattle breeders and supported by considerable body of studies and data from agricyltural experts, notably Russell, of the Univer- sity of Maine, that female germ cells, or ova, fertilized promptly after their pro- ductfon by the ovary would produce equal numbers . of males and females, while those which are delayed several days, or even a week before fertilization, produce & considerable preponderance of males. The question is still under hot debate and laborious experimentation, all over the scientific world, and these findings are sharply challenged from various points of view, and are, of course, too few as yet to wettle the question. But thelr general tendency is to render at least probable that various abnormal conditions which injure the vitality of the ovum, or female germ cell may be cap- able of upsetting the balance of the sqxes, and that the commonest result of this upset is an increase of males. Apparently for the reason, humiliating as it may be to our masculine pride, that it takes less goods and trouble to make a male than it does a female. When Nature hasn’t enough material to produce her masterpiece, the female, she does the next best she can, and turns out a male. As one eminent experimenter expresses it, in all the shufflings and combinations of the chromsome dice, “the female is always something plus,” or to reduce it to & mathematical formula, “Femala equals male + x.” This leads us to the apparent probabil- ity that whenever ¢ “ditions are such as to depress the vitality and weaken the health of mothers, 8o that the nutrition of their ova, or germ cells, suffers, there may be an increase of male births. ‘No conditions could possibly be de- vised better adapted to produce lowering and disturbing of the nutrition of the mother, and through her of the ovum than that devil’s complex which we call war, There is loss of the wage earner and supporter of the family and marked impairment of the family income and food supply, housing and general comfort. There is grief and worry over the ab- sence of dear ones and often destitution after thelr loss, which necessitates the women turning out to do men's work in addition to their own. There is a tre- mendous rise in the price of food and a corresponding drop in the quality and quantity, There is frequently pestilence and for those who are unfortunate enough to live in the regions actually fought over, pri vation, massacre and famine as well, A similar surplus of male births has often been reported after famines and destruc- tive pestilences. If anything which depresses the re- sisting power of the maternal protoplasm will increase the probability of male births, then war certainly ought to be the most powerful male sex determinagg {maginable