SEX DETERMINATION

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 102, 27 October 1938, Page 27

SEX DETERMINATION

Sex determination was discussed at the Summer School of the British Social Hygiene Council, held at Hornsea, Yorkshire, recently. Mr. T. H. Hawkins, Professor of Biology, said there were various theories advanced as to what precisely determined sex. Some held that all a woman had to do was to keep telling herself that she would have a boy and it would be a boy. There were others who thought that the kind of food the woman ate actually-determined the seat of her offspring, and again it was held by some that the quantity of food was the answer to the problem. These were probably "old wives' tales" and not the true issue in determining sex. Reputed biologists claimed that by governing the type of food which the oyster ate they could determine the $ex of its offspring. Mr. Hawkins said there were many parallels between human beings and animals in the process of love-making. The croaking of the male frog was surely the beginning of the aesthetic sense, and that was also evident in the singing of the bird, the trumpeting of elephants, while the tapping of the deathwatch beetle was but the call oi the mala for the female.