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This chapter discusses mid-Victorian natural history sciences, focusing on the disputes over the classification within both the zoological and botanical communities. Zoologists argued over the merits of William Macleay’s quinary system, claiming that all organisms could be classified in groups of five. Botanists attacking the Linnaean or sexual system were divided over what should replace it; the most widely used of its rivals was known as the natural system. Several metropolitan naturalists felt the need to bring stability by settling these arguments. Hugh Strickland was the most prominent zoological stabiliser, an opponent of quinarianism and other forms of classificatory radicalism. Strickland established the world’s first formal rules of zoological nomenclature and attempted to use the authority of the British Association to impose them on naturalists.

Reproductive isolation between populations provides an efficient mechanism to generate diversity across time and space. This chapter presents an empirical framework that treats speciation as a natural consequence of rapidly evolving sex and reproduction-related traits and genes. As genetic systems, processes involving sex and reproduction cover a broad range: from the multitude of genes expressed in a sex-specific manner to the myriad of morphological traits and behaviours that are part of each species’ sexual repertoire. Components of sexual systems appear to be universally more variable, novel, and rapidly evolving, holding the key to understanding the early stages of species formation and divergence. Studying the genomics of sexual systems provides a comprehensive experimental approach that incorporates sexual selection into theories of speciation. The chapter proposes that a sexual vs. non sexual, functional treatment of the species genome on mechanisms of speciation warrants a new focus on the genomics of sexual systems.

The Crustacea have evolved a broad range of sexual systems, including various types of gonochorism, hermaphroditism, and parthenogenesis. This chapter provides an overview of sexual systems in Crustacea and compares them in the species-rich Decapoda, Isopoda, Amphipoda, Cirripedia, Cladocera, Copepoda, and Ostracoda, which differ considerably with respect to phylogeny, ecology, and life histories. Gonochorism is considered to be the ancient sexual system of Crustacea. Hermaphroditism and parthenogenesis originated many times independently from gonochorism and occur in an estimated 2.2% and 2.4% of species, respectively. Crustaceans differ from the other arthropod groups mainly by the abundance and diversity of hermaphroditic reproduction. Phylogenetic analysis of extant species, the fossil record, and evolutionary ecological theory enable the reconstruction and explanation of divergent evolutionary trajectories of sexuality in the crustacean groups. The specificities can partly be attributed to differences in lifestyle, life history, and adaptive responses to different environments, but may also be the result of evolutionary constraint and competing adaptive strategies that lower the propensity of sexual system shifts. The genetic underpinning and molecular mediation of sexual system shifts are beginning to be unraveled in entomostracan and malacostracan models. A better understanding of the sexual systems in Crustacea may help to optimize their culture and conservation and answer key evolutionary questions like the enigma of sex.

This chapter features the first half of Kaan’s Psychopathia Sexualis. It begins with examinations of sexual systems in plant and animal life, eventually narrowing the discussion down to sexual development in the human body. Along with illustrating the biological distinctions between the sexes, the chapter also discusses the psychological development of human beings, particularly as it occurs around puberty. These foreground a more detailed look into human sexual instinct and sexual deviations, from whence the chapter introduces the term Psychopathia sexualis to mean a collection of these sexual aberrations, classified as “a disease of the imagination that emanates from the sexual system and reflects back on itself.”

This chapter compares two sexual systems: hermaphroditism (each individual can produce gametes of either sex) and gonochorism (each individual produces gametes of only one of the two distinct sexes) in crustaceans. These two main sexual systems contain a variety of alternative modes of reproduction, which are of great interest from applied and theoretical perspectives. The chapter focuses on the description, prevalence, analysis, and interpretation of these sexual systems, centering on their evolutionary transitions. The ecological correlates of each reproductive system are also explored. In particular, the prevalence of “unusual” (non-gonochoristic) reproductive strategies has been identified under low population densities and in unpredictable/unstable environments, often linked to specific habitats or lifestyles (such as parasitism) and in colonizing species. Finally, population-level consequences of some sexual systems are considered, especially in terms of sex ratios. The chapter aims to provide a broad and extensive overview of the evolution, adaptation, ecological constraints, and implications of the various reproductive modes in this extraordinarily successful group of organisms.

This chapter examines Naomi Seidman's A Marriage Made in Heaven, the first book-length study of the importance of issues of gender to modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature and to cultural processes. The perspective of the study is comparative. As such it provides new insights into interrelations of gender and Jewish literature and expands our understanding of Jewish cultural development in important ways. Ties between language and gender in Jewish languages have already been noted by Jewish critics such as Shmuel Niger and Max Weinreich. Seidman's study, however, is the first to show how these connections corresponded to and reinforced the culture's social division along sexual lines. It demonstrates how the sexual linguistic system worked in Hebrew and Yiddish literature in the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, and emphasizes how specific intersections between linguistic and gender structures eventually connected language ideologies to ideals of modern nation-building in later decades of the twentieth century.

Chapter 14 explores literary and scientific reactions to the idea of sex in plants. England experienced a fashion for “phytoerotica”: bawdy verse, in which plants represented human genitalia, and classically inspired poetry, in which stamens and pistils were personified as husbands, wives and lovers. The former had little to do with plants. The latter served to teach the Linnaean sexual classification system. In reaction, some botanists rejected both the sexual theory and the Linnaean system. Two camps developed, the “sexualists” and the “asexualists”. J.G. Siegesbeck railed, “[Who] will ever believe that God Almighty should have introduced such…shameful whoredom for the propagation of the reign of plants.” The negative impact of the sexual system on the morals of women became the asexualist’s rallying cry. In 1759, the Pope banned all Linnaeus’s books and ordered them burned. Nevertheless, Erasmus Darwin’s “Loves of Plants,” with its fascinating female plant characters, was a hit.