Man and woman : a study of human secondary sexual characters / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Man and woman : a study of human secondary sexual characters / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    those which indirectly favour reproduction and which might conceivably be developed by sexual selection as understood by Darwin, whether or not they actually are so developed. There are, however, other sexual differences which do not so easily fall into this group. These differences are less obvious; many of them are relative, or only perceptible when we take averages into consideration; but they are very numerous. Thus we have, for in- stance, the much greater shallowness, proportionately, of the female skull; we have the greater size and activity of the thyroid gland in women and the smaller average proportion of red blood corpuscles; and we have a different average relationship of the parts of the brain to each other. These differences are probably related indirectly to primary and secondary sexual differences; they are not of great importance from the zoological point of view, but they are of considerable interest from the anthropological point of view, very often of interest from the patho- logical point of view, and occasionally of great interest from the social point of view. They cannot be easily put into the same group as the secondary sexual characters as usually understood; and perhaps it would be convenient if we were to agree to distinguish them as tertiary sexual characters. It would be desirable to have a fairly definite classification of sexual characters into groups, but there is no distinct natural division between the groups which tend to merge into each other. Professor Charles Stewart defines secondary sexual characters as comprising those features by which we are enabled to distinguish the male from the female quite irre- spective of the essential organs of reproduction, and which are not concerned either in the nourishment or in the reproduction of the young. This seems to me to give an inconveniently large extension to the primary group, while it allows no place for what I have called the tertiary sexual characters. Ultimately, if we take a sufficiently broad outlook, all sexual characters, as Weis- mann points out, are really secondary (in the sense in which I have defined such characters): “Just as the differentiation of cells into male and female reproductive elements is secondary,”