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But when an ovum bearing femaleness meets a sperm, the resulting individual is female, femaleness being a Mendelian "dominant" to maleness; if both be present, femaleness appears. The female, however, is not female all through as the male is male all through. So far as sex is concerned, he is made of maleness plus maleness; but she is made of femaleness plus maleness.
If we represent the character of femaleness by F and maleness or the recessive by f, we have the ordinary sexual union represented by Ffxff; the gametes will then be F+f and f+f and the fertilisations Ff and ff, or males and females in equal numbers, as they are, at least approximately, in fact.
In accordance with the view that the dominant is something present which is absent in the recessive, the Mendelian theory of sex assumes that femaleness is dominant, and that maleness is the absence of femaleness, the absence of something which makes the individual female.
Nevertheless, there remains the fact that, in the variety which is normally included within the female sex, there is yet a certain character, or combination of characters, upon which, indeed, distinctive femaleness depends.
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