in its broadest sense. I simply mean that they
are autogenetic. In the _rhabdocoela_ the sexual organs appear in their
simplest forms--a testis anterior to a single or double ovary. Other
gliding worms have a more complex arrangement of the sexual organs, but
most of them are true hermaphrodites. Next in the chain of evolutionary
development, and one step nearer man, we find the soft worms
(_scolecidae_); from a branch of this family the parent group of
vertebrates was developed. The immediate ancestor of the vertebrates was
either the amphioxus (lancelet) or some other notochordate animal, whose
type is now extinct. Thus we have traced hermaphroditism from the
am[oe]ba to the amphioxus, from the ancestor of the parent cell to the
ancestor of the vertebrates. We could carry it further, but it is
unnecessary. Effemination and viraginity, are due directly to the
influence of that strange law laid down by Darwin--the law of reversion
to ancestral types. It is an effort of nature to return man to the old
hermaphroditic form from which he was evolved. It is an effort on the
part of nature to incorporate the individualities of the male and
female, both physical and psychical, in one body. The phenomenon of
atavism is more apt to occur in feeble types than in strong, healthy and
well-developed types. Microcephalism, occurring, as it most frequently
does, among ignorant, ill-nourished, and unhealthy people, is an
example. Dolichocephalism and a flattening of the cranial arch, with
corresponding loss of capacity in the skull--types that we see
everywhere among the depraved and vicious--are other examples of this
tendency of atavism to seize on weakened and unhealthy subjects.
Effemination finds more victims among the wealthy and the educated than
among the poor and uneducated. This phenomenon is a psychic rather than
a physical hermaphroditism, and is directly traceable to the enervation
produced by the habits of the wealthy and unemployed. Wealth begets
luxury, luxury begets debauchery and consequent enervation. Periods of
moral decadence in the life of a nation are always coincident with
periods of luxury and great wealth, with consequent enervation and
effemination; examples of this may be found in the histories of Rome,
Greece, and France. During the reign of Louis XV., examples of
effemination crowded into the court and vied with the royal fop in the
splendor of their raiment and effeminacy of their bearing. Psychic
hermaph