A DIFFERENCE IN THE METABOLISM OF THE SEXES 49
in persons of the upper classes and lower in the poorer classes. Observations of boys who were inmates of workhouses gave a mean specific gravity of 1052.8 and on schoolboys a mean of 1056, while among the undergraduate students of Cambridge University he found a mean of 1059.5. Several men of very high specific gravity in the last group had distinguished themselves in athletics. "Workhouse boys are in most cases of poor physique, and one can hardly find a better antithesis than the general type of physique common among the athletic members of such a university as Cambridge."[1] There is no more conclusive evidence of an organic difference between man and woman than these tests of the blood. They permit us to associate a high specific gravity, red corpuscles, plentiful haemoglobin, and a katabolic constitution.
A comparison of the waste products of the body and of the quantity of materials consumed in the metabolic process indicates a relatively larger consumption of energy by man. It is stated that man produces more urine than woman in the following proportion: men 1000 to 2000 grams daily; women 1000 to 1400 grams. As age advances the amount diminishes absolutely and relatively in proportion to the diminution of the energy of the metabolic process. A table prepared from adults of both sexes, twenty-five years of age, of the average weight of sixty kilograms shows a larger proportion both of inorganic and organic substances in the urine of men.[2] Milne Edwards has found that the bones of the male are slightly richer in inorganic substances than those of the female.[3]
The lung capacity of women is less, and they consume less oxygen and produce less carbonic acid than men of equal weight, although the number of respirations is slightly higher than in man. On this account women suffer deprivation of air more easily than men. They are not so easily suffocated, and are reported to endure charcoal fumes better, and live in high altitudes where men cannot endure the deprivation of oxygen.[4] The number of
