The Mystery of Sex, or Sex Polarity

...higher members of the snail family, are hermaphroditic having both male and female reproductive organs. Among some of the higher forms of life, even occasionally in humans, this condition appears as a biological throwback original: "reversion" or an abnormal state. However, in many lower forms of life, this condition is natural and normal. It must be remembered that even in the human race, each sex has organs which are rudimentary undeveloped or basic counterparts to the developed organs of the other sex. The breasts and prostate gland in the male, and the clitoris in the female, are examples of this. A fish is sometimes male on one side and female on the other. Male frogs sometimes contain well-developed ovaries.

Geddes Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), a Scottish biologist and sociologist says:

“An organism may be said to be truly hermaphrodite when both male and female organs are present, or when, even without separate organs, both male and female reproductive elements are produced. It is then both anatomically and physiologically hermaphroditic, and of this, as we shall see, there are abundant examples among the lower animals. The snail, earthworm, and leech are examples of this hermaphroditism, in varying degrees of closeness.”

There are two theories regarding the origin of hermaphroditism. One view holds that hermaphroditism was the primitive condition, and that the unisexual having only one sex, or one-sex condition, resulted from it through evolution. The second view is that being unisexual was the original condition, and that hermaphroditism evolved from that. Other authorities hold that both theories may be true, and that the original and secondary conditions varied among different species.

Geddes says:

“One view of the matter is that hermaphroditism was the primitive state among multicellular animals, at least after the differentiation of the sexual elements had been accomplished. In alternating cycles original: "rhythms", eggs and sperm were produced. The organism was alternately male and female. Of this primitive hermaphroditism, there may be more or less of a recapitulation a biological repetition of evolutionary stages during an individual's development in the life history of the organism. Gegenbaur Karl Gegenbaur (1826–1903), a German anatomist who demonstrated that comparative anatomy is a key to understanding evolutionary history states the common opinion in the following cautious and concise words: ‘The hermaphrodite stage is the lower, and the condition of...