e and ending in a common canal, the oviduct, which
carries the eggs outside. Each of these glove-fingers is fairly wide
at the base, but tapers sharply towards the tip, which is closed.
It contains, arranged in a row, one after the other, like beads on a
string, a certain number of eggs, five or six for instance, of which the
lower ones are more or less developed, the middle ones half-way towards
maturity, and the upper ones very rudimentary. Every stage of evolution
is here represented, distributed regularly from bottom to top, from the
verge of maturity to the vague outlines of the embryo. The sheath clasps
its string of ovules so closely that any inversion of the order is
impossible. Besides, an inversion would result in a gross absurdity: the
replacing of a riper egg by another in an earlier stage of development.

Therefore, in each ovarian tube, in each glove-finger, the emergence of
the eggs occurs according to the order governing their arrangement in
the common sheath; and any other sequence is absolutely impossible.
Moreover, at the nesting period, the six ovarian sheaths, one by one and
each in its turn, have at their base an egg which in a very short time
swells enormously. Some hours or even a day before the laying, that egg
by itself represents or even exceeds in bulk the whole of the ovigenous
apparatus. This is the egg which is on the point of being laid. It is
about to descend into the oviduct, in its proper order, at its proper
time; and the mother has no power to make another take its place. It is
this egg, necessarily this egg and no other, that will presently be laid
upon the provisions, whether these be a mess of honey or a live prey; it
alone is ripe, it alone is at the entrance to the oviduct; none of the
others, since they are farther back in the row and not at the right
stage of development, can be substituted at this crisis. Its birth is
inevitable.

What will it yield, a male or a female? No lodging has been prepared,
no food collected for it; and yet both food and lodging have to be in
keeping with the sex that will proceed from it. And here is a much more
puzzling condition: the sex of that egg, whose advent is predestined,
has to correspond with the space which the mother happens to have found
for a cell. There is therefore no room for hesitation, strange though
the statement may appear: the egg, as it descends from its ovarian tube,
has no determined sex. It is perhaps during the few hours