On the one hand were the ancient traditions of male predominance in inheritance, reinforced by the peculiar emphasis which animal breeding 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 the biceps of the brain--of the individual could possibly produce such a specific modification of the germplasm he carries as to result in the inheritance of a similar development by his offspring. Mendel's experiments had shown that the characters we inherit are units or combinations of units, very difficult to permanently change or modify. They combine with each other in all sorts of complicated ways. Sometimes one will "dominate" another, causing it to disappear for a generation or more; but it is not broken up. These characters have a remarkable way of becoming "segregated" once more--that is, of appearing intact later on.