alike, seems to prove that the higher male death-rate is an impressed,
natural, and constitutional peculiarity due to sex alone. ) Dr.
Stockton Hough accounts for these facts in part by the more frequent
defective development of males than of females. We have before seen
that the male sex is more variable in structure than the female; and
variations in important organs would generally be injurious. But the
size of the body, and especially of the head, being greater in male
than female infants is another cause: for the males are thus more
liable to be injured during parturition. Consequently the still-born
males are more numerous; and, as a highly competent judge, Dr. Crichton
Browne (52. West Riding Lunatic Asylum Reports, vol. i. 1871, p. 8.
Sir J. Simpson has proved that the head of the male infant exceeds that
of the female by 3/8ths of an inch in circumference, and by 1/8th in
transverse diameter. Quetelet has shewn that woman is born smaller than
man; see Dr. Duncan, Fecundity, Fertility, and Sterility, 1871, p.
382.), believes, male infants often suffer in health for some years
after birth. Owing to this excess in the death-rate of male children,
both at birth and for some time subsequently, and owing to the exposure
of grown men to various dangers, and to their tendency to emigrate, the
females in all old-settled countries, where statistical records have
been kept, are found to preponderate considerably over the males. (53.
With the savage Guaranys of Paraguay, according to the accurate Azara
( Voyages dans l Amerique merid. tom. ii. 1809, pp. 60, 179), the
women are to the men in the proportion of 14 to 13.)
It seems at first sight a mysterious fact that in different nations,
under different conditions and climates, in Naples, Prussia,
Westphalia, Holland, France, England and the United States, the excess
of male over female births is less when they are illegitimate than when
legitimate. (54. Babbage, Edinburgh Journal of Science, 1829, vol. i.
p. 88; also p. 90, on still-born children. On illegitimate children in
England, see Report of Registrar-General for 1866, p. xv.) This has
been explained by different writers in many different ways, as from the
mothers being generally young, from the large proportion of first
pregnancies, etc. But we have seen that male infants, from the large
size of their heads, suffer more than female infants during
parturition; and as the mothers of illegitimate children must be more
liable than other women to undergo bad labours, from various causes,
such as attempts at concealment by tight lacing, hard work, distress of
mind, etc., their male infants would proportionably suffer. And this
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