the
seed; if this life-force be male, the plant must be male; and if the
life-force of the seed be female, the product must be a female plant.
The earth can possibly bring forth no other sex than that which the
life-force of the seed impels.

This is true in the animal creation. Within the female grows the seed
given her by the male, be it male or female, and she can grow none
other. In other words the male as is very evident on mature reflection
gives the soul or the inmost vital principle, and the female clothes
that soul, or gives it a body in which to operate. What else can the
male do; what office does he perform, if it is not strictly this: to
impart of his life-giving spirit! The mother in clothing this germ of
life commingles, intertwines, and insinuates her own spirit, at the same
time educating, instructing, and determining its development according
to the influence she imparts to it. So the offspring partakes largely of
the nature of both its parents. The determination as to whether he
begets a male or female depends entirely upon the inmost vital state of
the male at the time of giving, although he is unconscious of the fact,
so that he can have no choice and no regulation, as some writers most
absurdly claim, in the matter of the forth-coming sex. He determines or
produces it unconsciously and involuntarily, the mother simply receiving,
clothing, and issuing from her body what the father has given her.

It must not be forgotten when exploring these deep subjects that man is
a spiritual being, clothed with a material body, that his spirit is his
inmost, and that what proceeds from him in the generative act has life
from his inmost; consequently the life-giving principle of his semen is
from his inmost, which constitutes its life-giving power. This inmost
from the male, the begetting power, is clothed by his seminal fluid for
an All-wise purpose; it is not the gross material, the clothing, that
begets, but the living power which this material contains, which
fructifies, or becomes conjoined, or commingled with the vital force of
the ovule of the mother,[K] so that she can clothe it; and when so
conjoined the germ, or seed, is planted in congenial soil. Conception
has thus really taken place by virtue of this act, and the animal mother
proceeds with her reproduction precisely upon the same general
principles that mother earth reproduces corn from a single kernel.

[K] See Guernsey's Obstetrics, 3d edition