Two families have 5 " " 1 girl each. " " " 4 " " 1 " " "Of one family reckoning 6 boys (1 dead; making 7 in all) the mother has but one leg--the other having been amputated when she was fourteen.[2] _None of the mothers here (so for as I can learn) do work outside their homes_; except in odd cases, an odd day's washing or cleaning. "_None do regular work on farms, or otherwise._ "All the children are well-fed, clean and well clothed. Our Medical Nurse says she finds the finest babies here--of the whole of her district. For 57 years the yearly returns in School have shown a great preponderance of boys over girls." The writer contrasts this Utopian order of things with her experience of the rickety and otherwise diseased and defective states of school-children whose mothers were employed in factories. V It would seem that the embryological development of the male brain and nervous system, it is which demands more of vital expenditure on the part of the mother than does that of the female brain; less elaborately differentiated as is this in respect of concrete intellection and physical adaptation. For this reason, not only is more constitutional vitality on the mother's part required for the production of sons--and more particularly of virile sons--but the production of male offspring entails more stress, and exacts a greater toll, physical and psychical, than does the ante-natal nurture of the female embryo. Mothers who have borne female children with but little constitutional strain or suffering may be greatly debilitated, even invalided, during pregnancy with male offspring. One finds women permanently weakened in constitution and function, indeed, from the strain of producing a male. In such cases, the male may be exceptional of type. Or the mother may be of exceptionally low vitality. It has been argued that defect and degeneracy, as hare-lip, cleft-palate, clubbed or webbed-foot, are more common in the male because he is normally less highly-developed than the female is. The contrary is obviously the case. In creating a difficult and a simpler thing, there will necessarily be more failures in the difficult than in the simpler product. Being nearer to Nature, the female is usually more true to the normal type of species. But the type is not so fully differentiated, or specialised in relation to environment, as is the male. It is significant that the female _aphis_, when its vital potential is stimulated by summer heat, is able to breed without co-operation of the male, but breeds _females_ only. Supporting not only the view that the female is the rootstock of species, while the male is, so to speak, an alien grafted upon it, but indicating too, that the production of females represents less output of reproductive energy, since one sex alone is able to accomplish this. VI