“Yes the Third Sex. I prefer that name, though some have called it the neuter sex, others name it the Double Sex, or the Epicene or Common Sex, others the Hermes-Aphrodite. In some respects it is all of these, or either, or neither. But it is at any rate Third. I am not going to give you the recipe,” said he, “for if I do, when you leave here, and now and go back to the Nineteenth Century, you will be sure to let out the secret prematurely by two hundred years. But I can say that the development of the third sex is in reality no development at all, but an arrest of development, at a particular prenatal period. If you are informed in the science of embryology, you know that in the earliest stage of the embryos of all sexual animals, the sex is not determined, and at that stage there is nothing to distinguish whether the coming individual is to be male or female. It possesses possibilities of either and therefore the germs of both. At a second stage the elements of the essential organs of both sexes are developed in each individual and then the individual is both male and female, but not fully matured or developed. At the third stage the organs distinguishing one of the sexes are carried forward to functional perfection, while those pertaining to the other, are not developed any further, and in some cases are partly undone again. Now if the developement of the embryonic sexual organs be arrested during the second stage of growth or before it, the individual will be neither male nor female, but will belong to the third sex. The manner in which this arrest can be accomplished is the secret we imparted to you 20 years ago, and by means of which the important problem of the control of population can be solved by you as it was long ago done by us.” “Then you have the three sexes in the moon?” “We have had them for many ages, in fact, we would not know how to exist if we had but two.” “It is a wonder to me how you ever could have fallen upon so wonderful an arcanum—that nature seems to be carefully hiding from us.”