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THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE





CHAPTER I

THE SUBJECT OF AN IDEA

Love's general psychology.– Love according to natural laws. Sexual selection.– Man's place in Nature.– Identity of human and animal psychology.– The animal nature of love.

THIS book, which is only an essay, because its subject matter is so immense, represents, nevertheless, an ambition: one wanted to enlarge the general psychology of love, starting it in the very beginning of male and female activity, and giving man's sexual life its place in the one plan of universal sexuality.

Certain moralists have, undeniably, pretended to talk about "love in relation to natural causes," but they were profoundly ignorant of these natural causes: thus Senancour, whose book, blotted though it be with ideology, remains the boldest work on a subject so essential that nothing can drag it to triviality. If Senancour had been acquainted with the science of his time, if he had only read Reaumur and Bonnet, Buffon and Lamarck; if he

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had been able to merge the two ideas, man and animal into one, he, being a man without insurmountable prejudices, might have produced a still readable book. The moment would have been favorable. People were beginning to have some exact knowledge of animals' habits. Bonnet had proved the startling relationships of animal and vegetable reproduction; the essential principle of physiology had been found; the science of life was brief enough to be clear; one might have ventured a theory as to the psychological unity of the animal series.

Such a work would have prevented numerous follies in the century then beginning. One would have become accustomed to consider human love as one form of numberless forms, and not perhaps, the most remarkable of the lot, a form which clothes the universal instinct of reproduction; and its apparent anomalies would have found a normal explanation amid Nature's extravagance. Darwin arrived, inaugurated a useful system, but his views were too systematized, his aim too explanatory and his scale of creatures with man at the summit, as the culmination of universal effort, is of a too theologic simplicity. Man is not the culmination of nature, he is in he is one of the unities of life, that is all. He is the product of a partial, not of total evolution; the branch whereon he blossoms, parts like a thousand other branches from a common trunk. Moreover, Darwin, buckling to the religiose pudibundery of his race, has almost wholly neglected the actual facts of sex

this makes his theory of sexual selection, as the principle of change, incomprehensible. But even if he had taken account of the real mechanism of love, his conclusions,

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possibly more logical, would still have been inexact, for if sexual selection has any aim it can be but conservation. Fecundation is the reintegration of differentiated elements into a unique element, a perpetual return to the unity.

It is not particularly interesting to consider human acts as the fruits of evolution, for upon animal branches as clearly separate as those of insect and mammifer one finds sexual acts and social customs sensibly analogous, if not identical in many points.

If insects and mammifers have any common ancestor, save the primordial jelly, there must indeed have been very different potentialities in its amorphous contours to lead it here into being bee and there into being giraffe. An evolution leading to such diverse results has interest only as a metaphysical idea, psychology can get from it next to nothing of value.

We must chuck the old ladder whose rungs the evolutionists ascended with such difficulty. We will imagine, metaphorically, a centre of life, with multiple lives diverging from it; having passed the unicellular phase, we will take no count of hypothetic subordinations. One does not wish to deny, one wishes rather not to deny, either general or particular evolutions, but the genealogies are too uncertain and the thread which unites them too often broken: what, for example, is the origin of birds, organisms which seem at once a progress and a retrogression from the mammifer? On reflection, one will consider the different love mechanisms of all the dioicians as parallel and contemporary.

Man will then find himself in his proper and rather

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indistinct place in the crowd beside the monkeys, rodents and bats. Psychologically, one must quite often compare him with insects, marvellous flowering of the life force. And what clarity from the process, lights showering in from all corners. Feminine coquetry, the flight before the male, the return, the game of yes and no, the uncertain attitude seeming at once cruel and amorous, and not peculiar to the female human? Not at all. Célimène is of all species, and heteroclite above all; she is both mole and spider, she is sparrow and cantharide, she is cricket and adder. A celebrated author in a play called, I think, La Fille Sauvage, represents feminine love as aggressive. An error. The female attacked by the male thinks always of retreat, she never, never attacks, save in certain species which appear to be very ancient and which have persisted to our time only by prodigies of equilibrium. Even there one must make reserves, for when one sees the female aggressive, it is perhaps at the second or fourth phase of the game, not at the beginning. The female sleeps until the male arouses her, then she gives in, plays, or takes flight. The virgin's reserve before man is but a very moderate bashfulness if compared with the pellmell flight of a young mole intacta.

This is but one fact of a thousand. There is not one way of instinctive man with a maid which is not findable in one or other animal species; this is perfectly comprehensible seeing that man is an animal, submitted to the essential instincts which govern all animality; there being everywhere the same matter animate with the same desire: to live, to perpetuate life. Man's supe÷

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riority is in the immense diversity of his aptitudes. Animals are confined to one series of gestures, always the same ones, man varies his mimicry without limit; but the target is the same, and the result is the same, copulation, fecundation and eggs.

Belief in liberty has been born from the diversity of human aptitude, from man's power to reach the necessary termination of his activity by different routes, or to dodge this termination and suicide in himself the species whose future he bears. It, this liberty, is an illusion difficult not to have, an idea which one must shed if one wants to think in a manner not wholly irrational, but it is recompensingly certain that the multiplicity of possible activities is almost an equivalent of this liberty. Doubtless the strongest motive always wins, but today's stronger is tomorrow's weaker, hence a variety of human gaits feigning liberty, and practically resulting therein. Free will is only the faculty of being guided successively by a great number of different motives. When choice is possible, liberty begins, even though the chosen act is rigorously determined and when there is no possibility of avoiding it. Animals have a smaller liberty, restricted in proportion as their aptitudes are more limited; but when life begins liberty begins. The distinction, from this view point, between man and animal is quantitative, and not qualitative. One must not be gulfed by the scholastic distinction between instinct and intelligence; man is as full of instincts as the insect most visibly instinctive; he obeys them by methods more diverse, that is all there is to it.

If it is clear that man is an animal, it is also clear

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that he is a very complex one. One finds in him most of the aptitudes which are distributed one by one among beasts. There is hardly one of his habits, of his virtues, of his vices (to use the conventional terms) which can not be found either in an insect, a bird or a mammifer: monogamy, adultery, the "consequences"; polygamy, polyandry, lasciviousness, laziness, activity, cruelty, courage, devotion, any of these are common to animals, but each as the quality of an whole species. In the state of differentiation to which superior and cultivated human species have attained, each individual forms surely a separate variety determined by what is called, abstractly, "the character." This individual differentiation, very marked in mankind, is less marked in other animal species. Yet we note quite distinct characters in dogs, in horses and even in birds of the same race. It is quite probable that all bees have not the same character, since, for example, they are not all equally prompt to use their stings in analogous circumstances. Even there the difference between man and his brothers in life and in sensibility is but a difference of degree.

"Solidarity" is but an empty ideology if one limit it to human species. There is no abyss between man and animal; the two domains are separated by a tiny rivulet which a baby could step over. We are animals, we live on animals, and animals live on us. We both have and are parasites. We are predatory, and we are the living prey of the predatory. And when we follow the love act, it is truly, in the idiom of theologians, more bestiarum. Love is profoundly animal; therein is its beauty.

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CHAPTER II

THE AIM OF LIFE

The importance of the sexual act.– Its ineluctable character.– Animals who live only to reproduce themselves.– The strife for love, and for death.– Females fecundated at the very instant of birth.– The maintenance of life.

WHAT is life's aim? Its maintenance.

But the very idea of an aim is a human illusion. There is neither beginning, nor middle, nor end in the series of causes. What is has been caused by what was, and what will be has for cause the existent. One can neither conceive a point of rest nor a point of beginning. Born of life, life will beget life eternally She should, and wants to. Life is characterized on earth by the existence of individuals grouped into species, that is to say having the power, a male being united with a female, to reproduce a similar being. Whether it be the internal conjoining of protozoaires, or hermaphrodite fecundation, or the coupling of insects or mammifers, the act is the same: it is common to all that lives, and this not only to animals but to plants, and possibly even to such minerals as are limited by a non varying form. Of all possible acts, in the possibility that we can imagine, the

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sexual act is, therefore, the most important of all acts. Without it life comes to an end, and it is absurd to suppose its absence, for in that case thought itself disappears.

Revolt is useless against so evident a necessity. Our finikin scruples protest in vain; man and the most disgusting of his parasites are the products of an identical sexual mechanism. The flowers we have strewn upon love may disguise it as one disguises a trap for wild beasts; all our activities manúuvre along the edge of this precipice and fall over it one after another; the aim of human life is the continuation of human life.

Only in appearance does man escape this obligation of Nature. He escapes as an individual, and he submits as a species. The abuse of thought, religious prejudices, vices sterilize a part of humanity; but this fraction is of merely sociological interest; be he chaste or voluptuary, miserly or prodigal of his flesh, man is in his whole condition subject to the sexual tyranny. All men do not reproduce their species, neither do all animals; the feeble and the late-comers among insects die in their robe of innocence, and many nests laboriously filled by courageous mothers are devastated by pirates or by the inclemency of the sky. Let the ascetic not come boasting that he has freed his blood from the pressure of desire; the very importance which he ascribes to his victory but affirms the same power of the life-will.

A young girl, before the slightest love affair, will, if she is healthy, confess naively that she "wants to marry to have children." This so simple formula is the legend of Nature. What an animal seeks is not its own

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life but reproduction. Doubtless many animals seem, during a relatively long existence, to have but brief sexual periods, but one must make allowance for the period of gestation. In principle the sole occupation of any creature is to renew, by the sex act, the form wherewith it is clothed. To this end it eats to this end builds. This act is so clearly the aim, unique and definite that it constitutes the entire life of a very great number of animals, which are, notwithstanding, extremely complex.

The ephemera is born in the evening, and copulates the female lays eggs during the night, both are dead in the morning, without even having looked at the sun. These little animals are so little destined for anything else save love that they have not even mouths. They eat not, neither do they drink. One sees them hovering in clouds above the water, among the reeds. The males, although more numerous than the females, perform a multiple duty, and fall exhausted. The purity of such a life is to be admired in many butterflies: the silk moths, heavy and clumsy, shake their wings for an instant at birth, couple and die. The Great Peacock or Oak Bombyx, much larger than they, eats no more than they do: yet we see him traverse leagues of country in his quest of the female. He has only a rudimentary proboscis and a fake digestive apparatus. Thus his two or three days' existence passes without one egoistic act The struggle for life, much vaunted, is here the struggle to give life, the struggle for death, for if they can live three days in search of the female they die as soon as the fecundation is accomplished.

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Among all solitary bees, scolies, masons, bembex, and anthopores, the males born soonest, range about the nests awaiting the birth of the females. As soon as these appear they are seized and fecundated, knowing, thus, life and love in the same shiver. The female osmies and other bees are keenly watched by the males who nab and mount them as they emerge from the natal tube, the hollow stalk of a reed, flying at once with them into the air where the love feast is finished. Then while the male, drunk with his work, continues his deathflight, the female feverishly hollows the house of her offspring, partitions it, stores the honey for the larva, lays, whirls for an instant and dies. The year following: the same gestures above the same reeds split by the reed-gatherers; and thus in years following, the insect permitted never the least design save the conservation of one fragile form; brief apparition over flowers.

The sitaris is a coleopterous parasite in the nests of the anthopore. Copulation takes place on hatching. Fabre noticed a female still in her wrappings, whom a male already free was helping to get loose, waiting only the appearance of the extremity of the abdomen, to hurl himself thereupon. The sitaris' love lasts one minute, long season in a short life: the male drags on for two days before dying, the female lays on the very spot where she has been fecundated, dies, having known nothing but the maternal function in the strictest limit of her birthplace.

No one has ever seen the female palingenia. This butterfly is fecundated before even getting rid of her nymph's corset, she dies with her eyes still shut, mother,

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at once, and infant in swaddling clothes. Moralists love bees from whom they distil examples and aphorisms. They recommend us work, order, economy, foresight, obedience and divers virtues other. Abandon yourself boldly to labour: Nature wills it. Nature wills everything. She is complacent to all the activities; to our imaginings there is no analogy that she will refuse, not one. She desires the social constructions of bees; she desires also the Life All Love of the "Great Peacock," of the osmie, of the sitarist She desires that the forms she has created shall continue indefinitely, and to this end all means are, to her, good. But if she presents us the laborious example of the bee, she does not hide from us the polyandrous example, nor the cruel amours of the mantis. There is not in the will to live the faintest trace of our poor little human morality. If one wishes an unique sole morality, that is to say an universal commandment, which all species may listen to, which they can follow in spirit and in letter, if one wishes in short to know the "aim of life" and the duty of the living, it is necessary, evidently, to find a formula which will totalize all the contradictions, break them and fuse them into a sole affirmation. There is but one, we may repeat it, without fear, and without allowing any objection: the aim of life is life's continuation.

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CHAPTER III

SCALE OF SEXES

Asexual reproduction.– Formation of the animal colony. – Limits of asexual reproduction.– Coupling.– Birth of the sexes.– Hermaphrodism and parthenogenesis. Chemical fecundation.– Universality of parthenogenesis.

THE primitive mode of reproduction is asexual, or what one will so consider provisorily, in comparison with more complex mechanism. In the first living forms there are neither sexual organs nor differentiated sexual elements. The animal reproduces itself by scissiparity or by budding; the individual divides itself in two parts, or a protuberance develops, forms a new being and then separates.

Scissiparity is an inexact term, for the division is transversal, and the two parts far from equal; it occurs in protozoaires, and further in worms, star fish and polyps. Budding is common to protozoaires, infusoria, cúlenterata, to fresh water polyps and to nearly all vegetables. A third primitive mode, sporulation, consists in the production inside the organism of particular cells, spores, which separate and become individuals; this occurs in protozoaires, as well as in ferns, algae and mushrooms.

The first two modes, division and budding, serve also

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for the formation of animal colonies, when the new individual retains a point of contact with the generating individual. It is by this notion of colony that one explains complex beings, and even superior animals, in considering them as reunions of simple primitive beings which have differentiated themselves and still retained a solidarity, sharing the physiological work between them. Colonies of protozoaires are formed of individuals having identical functions, living in perfect equality, despite the hierarchy of position; colonies of metazoaires are composed of specialised members whose separation may be a cause of death for the total individual. There is then, in the latter case, a new being composed of distinct elements which, retaining a certain essential autonomy, have become the organs of a new entity.

The first living organisms formed their hierarchies thus: individual unicellular, or plastide; group of plastides or meride. The merides' as the protozoaires, can reproduce themselves asexually, or by division or budding. They may separate completely or remain attached to their generator. If they remain attached one has mounted a step and attained the zoide. Thence, by colonies of zoides one gets individuals still more complex, called demes. None of these terms is much more than a convenience for memory. The nomenclature stops, as does the progression, at a certain moment, for the evolution has its limit, its finality, as does even the milieu in which life continues to evolve. One might say that heaving up from the obscure vital centre, the new animalshoots branch upward until they knock their heads upon an ideal or imaginary roof which prevents any further

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climbing. This is the death of the species, and Nature contemptuously abandoning her work, begins to make yet another mould of the initial ooze, to derive from it a new form. The dream of an unlimited transformation of actual species is pure chimæra; they will disappear one by one, according to their order of primogeniture, according to their faculty for adapting themselves to the changing milieu, and one might foresee, if the earth lasts, in a distant time an unimaginable fauna replacing the present fauna, and even replacing man.

Man is a metazoaire, that is to say an animal with differentiated pluricellules, like the sponge, the wheel animals, and the annelids. He belongs to the artizoaire series: a head, belly, back, bilateral symmetry; to the vertebrate branch: internal skeleton, cartilaginous and osseous; to the class of mammifers to the sub-class of placentaires; to the group of primates not far from the chiroptera (bats) and the rodents.

In regard to the life transmitting mechanism the animals are divided somewhat differently. On one side budding and division, or scissiparity, is prolonged rather far into the metazoaire series concurrent with sexual reproduction; on the other hand there are, among protozoaires, phenomena of coupling, unions of cellules which resemble veritable fecundation and perform its rôle; without the nuclear regeneration which is the aim and consequence, neither segmentation nor budding can take place, at least not indefinitely. In sum, the reproduction of beings is always sexual; only in the one case, the protozoaires, it is produced by non differentiated elements; and in the other, the metazoaires, by differen-

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tiated elements, a male and a female. If one clips off bits of a sponge, a hydra, one obtains as many new individuals, which when they have grown one may again divide, and so on repeatedly, but not indefinitely. At a variable instant, after a certain number of generations by fragmentation, senescence appears among the so produced individuals; the clipped morsels remain inert. Thus this sort of artificial virgin birth has a limit, as has normal parthenogenesis, and in order that the individuals may regain their parthenogenetic force one must give them time to regenerate their cellules by the coupling which fecundates them.

Fecundation is in all cases, doubtless, merely a rejuvenation, thus considered it is uniform not only throughout the animal series, but throughout the vegetable. One ought to experiment in slip cutting, and discover at what point the slip cut from a slip begins to diminish in vitality. Coupling and fecundation have the same result: it is necessary that cellules A unite with cellules B (macro nucleus and micro nucleus among protozoaires; ovule and spermatozoid among metazoaires), in order that the organism may usefully exteriorize a part of its substance. When the too complex organism has lost the primitive faculty of segmentation, it makes use, directly, to reproduce itself, of certain cellules differentiated for that purpose: it is these cellules united into a whole, which reintegrate and give birth to a double of the generating individual or individuals. From the top to the bottom of the sexual scale the new being springs invariably from a duality. The multi÷

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placation takes place only in space. In time the product is a contraction, two giving one.

Scissiparity is compatible with the existence of separate sexes, as in the starfish. This fantastic animal with no instrument save its suckers opens oysters, envelops them with its stomach which it unbellies (vomits), devours them. It is not less curious in reason of its variety of reproductive mode, serving itself of sexual apparatus, or budding, or casting an arm which becomes a new creature. Thus it is difficult to class animals according to their manner of reproduction; hermaphrodism is another block. This mode is doubtless primitive, since it is of the type of protozoaire coupling, but it is greatly complicated when it persists, for example up to the moment where it disappears in the mollusk series, whereof some possess so luxurious a love organism. The simple and very naive form, that in which the sperm and the eggs are produced simultaneously inside the same individual, is found only in inferior organisms. Normal parthenogenesis belong equally to summary and to complicated animals, to wheel animals and to bees. Among arthropodes, that is to say among insects in general, the sexes are always separate, save in certain tardigrade arachnids, but these are the ones which offer the finest cases of parthenogenesis, generation without aid of the male. The term need not be taken literally. For as there is no indefinite scissiparity without coupling, there is no unlimited parthenogenesis without fecundation: the female is fecundated for several generations which transmit this power, but there comes a day when the female who has not encountered a male gives birth to males and females.

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They couple and produce females parthenogenetically endowed. This has been for long time a mystery,– it is still a mystery, for side by side with normal parthenogenesis there is irregular parthenogenesis, there are cases where non fecundated eggs behave exactly as fecundated eggs, without anyone's knowing why.

The virgin begotten cycle of plant lice is famous, that of wheel animals not less entertaining. The males, smaller than the females, live but two or three days, couple and die. The fecundated females lay eggs whence come nothing but females, unless the eggs are subjected to a temperature above 18 degrees (centigrade); above that the eggs hatch out males. Between the periods of coupling there are long stretches of virgin birth, nothing but females producing females, until the temperature permits a male hatch. In two years the plant louse runs through ten or twelve parthenogeneses; in July of the second year, there appear winged individuals, these are still female, but double size, and they lay two sets of eggs, whereof the smaller hatch male (the male is three or four times smaller than the female), the larger eggs hatch female; there is coupling and the cycle begins again.

For long people believed the plant louse truly androgynous. Réaumur and Bonnet, having seen isolated plant lice reproduce themselves were convinced of this, when Trembley, a man of genius, celebrated also for his observations of hydra, threw out the idea: Who knows whether a coupling of these lice does not fecundate them for several generations? He had discovered the basis of parthenogenesis. Facts upheld him. Bonnet described

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the male and female, and noted even the genital ardour of this sticking leaf louse, this milch cow of the ants.

Parthenogenesis is a sign post. Nothing more clearly demonstrates the importance of the male or the precision of his function. The female appears to be the whole show, without the male she is nothing. She is the machine and has to be wound up to go. The male is merely the key. People have tried to obtain fecundation by false keys. Eggs of sea anemones, and star fish have been hatched by contact with exciting chemicals, acids, alkalines, sugar, salt, alcohol, ether, chloroform, strychnine gas, carbonic acid. But one has never been able to bring these scientific larvæ to maturity, and everything leads one to believe that if one succeeded, and that if these artificial beings were capable of reproduction, it would be but for a limited period. This provoked parthenogenesis is neither more nor less interesting than the normal. It is doubtless abnormal, but abnormal parthenogenesis is not infrequent in nature; eggs of the bombyx, of star fish, and of frogs, hatch sometimes without fecundation, and very probably because they have accidentally come up against the very stimulant which the excellent experimenters have lavished on them. Whether sperm acts as an "excitant" or as fecundator the action is no easier to understand by one label than by another. The queen bee lays both fecundated and non fecundated eggs; the first hatch female, the second invariably male, here the male element would seem to be the product of parthenogenesis and the female to require previous fecundation. In contrast, among plantlice, the generations of female continue for nearly two

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years. There is an order in these things, as in all things, but it is not yet apparent; one notes only, that however long and varied be the parthenogenetic period, it is limited somewhere by the necessity of the female principle being united with the male principle. After all, hereditary fecundation is no more extraordinary than particular fecundation, it is a mode of perpetuating life which the exercise of one's reason should make one consider as perfectly normal.

One ought, at the end of this summary chapter, to be courageous enough to say that fecundation, as vulgarly understood, is merely an illusion. Taking man and woman (or no matter what dioic metazoaire) the man does not fecundate the woman; what happens is at once more mysterious and more simple. From the male A, the great Male, and from the great Female B are born without any fecundation whatever, spontaneously, little males a and little females b. These little males are called spermatozoides, and the little females, ovules; it is between these new creatures, between these spores, that the fecundating union occurs. One then observes that a and b resolve themselves into a third animal x, which by natural growth becomes either A or B. Then the cycle begins again. The union between A and B is merely a preparation; A and B are nothing but channels carrying a and b, carrying them often far beyond themselves. Like the plant lice or drones, the mammifers called man are subject to alternate generation, one parthenogenesis always separating the veritable conjunction of the differentiated elements. Coupling is not fecundation; it is merely the mechanism; its utility

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is merely in that it puts two parthenogenetic products into relation. This relation occurs inside the female, or outside the female (as in case of fishes); the milieu has an importance of fact, not of principle.

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CHAPTER IV

SEXUAL DIMORPHISM

I. Invertebrates: formation of the male.– Primitivity of the female.– Minuscule males: the bonellie.– Regression of the male into the male organ: the cirripedes.– Generality of sexual dimorphism.– Superiority of the female in most insect species.– Exceptions.– Numeric dimorphism.– Female hymenoptera.– Multiplicity of her activities.– Male's purely sexual role.– Dimorphism of ants and termites.– Grasshoppers and crickets.– Spiders.– Coleoptera.– Glow worm.– Cock near's strange dimorphism.

I. INVERTEBRATES. At a moment fairly undecided in the general evolution the male organ specializes into the male individual. Religious symbolisms may or might have been intended to mean this. The female is primitive. At the third month, the human embryo has external uro genital organs clearly resembling the female organs. To arrive at complete female estate they need undergo but a very slight modification; to become male they have to undergo a considerable and very complex transformation. The external genital organs of the female are not, as has been often said, the product of an arrested development; quite the contrary, the male organs undergo a supplementary development, which is

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moreover useless, for the penis is a luxury and a danger: the bird who does without it is no less wanton thereby.

One finds general proof of the female's primitivity in the extreme smallness of certain male invertebrates, so tiny indeed that one can only consider them as autonomous masculine organs, or even as spermatozoides. The male of the syngames (an internal parasite of birds) is less a creature than an appendix; he remains in constant contact with the organs of the female, stuck obliquely into her side, and justifying the name "two headed worm" which has been given to this wretched and duplex animalculus. The female bonellie is a sea worm shaped like a sort of cornucopia sack fifteen centimetres in length: the male is represented by a minuscule filament of about one or two millimetres, that is to say about one thousandth her size. Each female supports about twenty. These males live, first in the úsophagus, then descend into the oviduct where they impregnate the eggs. Only their very definite function clears them from the charge of being parasites; in fact they were long supposed to be parasites, while men sought vainly for the male of the prodigious bonellie.

Side by side with males who are merely individualized sexual organs, one sees males who have lost nearly all organs save the male organ itself. Certain hermaphrodite cirripedes (mollusks attached by a peduncle [stalk] ) cling as parasites to the coat of other cirripedes: whence a diminution of volume, a regression of ovaries, abolition of nutritive functions; the stalk takes root in the living, nourishing milieu. But one organ, the male one, persists in these diminished cirripedes, and takes on enor

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mous proportions, absorbing the whole of the animal. With only a slight further change one would see the transformation of male into male organ completely accomplished, as one does, moreover, in the hydraria. Become again an integral part of an organism from which it had formerly separated to become an individual, the male merely returns to its origins and clearly certifies what they were.

The bonellie, which is one of the most definite examples of dimorphism, is also an example of the singular feminism which one normally finds in nature. For feminism reigns there, especially among inferior species and in insects. It is almost only among mammifers and in certain groups of birds that the male is equal or superior to the female. One would say that he has slowly attained a first place not intended by nature for him. It is probable that, relieved of all care, after the fecundation, he has had more leisure than the female wherein to develop his powers. It is also possible, and more probable, that these extremely diverse cases of resemblance and dissemblance are due to causes too numerous and too varied for us to seize their logical sequence. The facts are obvious: the male and the female differ nearly always, and differ often profoundly. Many insects vulgarly supposed to be different species are but males and females of one race seeking each other for mating. It needs some knowledge to recognize a pair of blackbirds, the male black all over, and the female brown backed with grey throat and russet belly.

While hermaphrodism demands a perfect resemblance of individuals– save in cases like the cirripedes, where

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there is a male supplementary parasite– the separation of the sexes leads, in principle, to dimorphism, the role of the male, his modes of activity differ from those of the female; a difference found also among dioic plants. Hemp is a well known case, although the taller shoots which the peasants call male are. in exact contrary, the females. The small garden loving nettle has two sexes on the same stalk; the greater nettle, found in uncultivated land, is dioic: the male stalk has very long flopping leaves and flowers hanging along the stem; the leaves and flowers of the female stalk are short and stand almost upright. Here the dimorphism is not in favour of the female, but impartial.

Of insects the female is nearly always the superior individual. It is not this marvellous small creature, nature's divergent and minuscule king who offers us the spectacle of the bilhargie, spearwort, whereof the female, mediocre blade, lives, like a sword sheathed in the hollow stomach of the male. This timid life and its perpetual amours would horrify the bold female scarabúa, adroit chalicodomes, cold wise Iycoses, and proud, terrible, amazonian mantes. In the insect world the male is the frail elegant sex, gentle and sober, with no employment save to please and to love. To the female the heavy work of digging, of masonry, and the danger of hunt and of war.

There are exceptions, but found chiefly among parasites, among the degraded, like the xenos which lives without distinction upon wasps, coleoptera, and nevroptera. The male is provided with two large wings; the female has neither wings, feet, eyes, nor antennæ is a

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small worm. After metamorphosis the male emerges, flies a little, then returns to the female who has remained inside the nymphal envelope, and fecundates her in her wrappings.

Other exceptions, this time normal, are furnished by butterflies, that is to say by a sort of insect which is very placid, and which, at least in the winged form, is addicted neither to hunting nor to any trade or business function. One gives the name "psyche" to a very small butterfly which flutters out rather clumsily in the morning; it is the male. The female is a huge worm, fifteen times as long, ten times as fat. The lovers are in the proportion of a cock to a cow. Here the feminism is wholly ludicrous. There is the same disproportion in the mulberry bombyx, of which the female is much heavier than the male; she flies with difficulty, a passive beast who submits to a fecundation lasting several hours; likewise in the autumn butterfly, cheimatobia, the male sports two pairs of fine wings on a spindle body, the female is a gross fat keg with rudimentary wings, incapable of flight; she climbs difficultly into trees on whose buds her caterpillar feeds itself; in the case of another butterfly which one calls, absurdly, the orgye, the male has all the characteristics of lepidoptera, the female is almost wingless with a heavy and swollen body and a carriage about as pleasing as that of a monstrous woodlouse; there is the same disproportion in the graceful, agile and delicate liparis, known as the zig zag because of his wing markings; he would hardly discover his mate without aid from instinct, she being a whitish beast with heavy abdomen ruminating motionless in the tree bark.

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Neighbouring species, the monk, the brown rump, the gold rump show hardly any sexual differences.

Numeric dimorphism follows dimorphism of mass; the family of one sort of butterfly of the Marquesas Islands is composed of one male and of five females all different, so different that one long supposed them distinct species. Here the advantage is obviously on the side of the male lord of this splendid harem. Nature, profoundly ignorant of our sniveling ideas of justice and equality, vastly pampers certain animal species, while showing herself harsh and indifferent to others; now the male is favoured, now the female, upon whom the greatest mass of superiorities is heaped, and upon whom likewise all the cruelties and disdains. The hymenoptera include bees, bumblebees, wasps, scolies, ants, masons, sphex, bembex, osmies, etc. The place of these among insects is analogous to that of the primates or even of man among mammifers. But while woman, not animally inferior to her male, remains below him in nearly all intellectual activities, among the hymenoptera the female is both brain and the tool, the engineer, the working staff, the mistress, mother, and nurse unless, as in the case of bees, she casts upon a third sex all duties not purely sexual. The males make love. The male of the tachyte, a sort of wasp rather like the sphex, is about eight times smaller than the female, but he is a very ardent small lover, marvellously equipped for the amorous quest; his citron coloured diadem is made of eyes, is a girdle of enormous eyes, a lighthouse whence he explores his horizon, ready to fall like an arrow upon the loitering female. When fecundated, the she tachyte constructs a cellular nest which she

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packs with the terrible mantis, of whom she is the always victorious enemy; for knowing by incomprehensible instinct whether she is about to lay a male or a female egg, she augments or diminishes, according to its sex, the larder for the larva: the tiny male is allotted a dwarf provision.

The male hornet is notably smaller than the female, and the neuter hornet still smaller. The male pine lophyr is black, the female yellow. The male of the chalicodome or mason bee is russet, the far more beautiful female is a fine velvety black with deep violet wings. While the male loafs and bumbles she artfully and patiently rears the big domed clay nest where her offspring pass their larvae days. This bee lives in colonies but the labour is individual, each doing her work without bothering about that of her neighbour, unless it be to rob her or spoil her construction, as in a civilization not unknown to us. The female mason is armed, but by no means aggressive.

In many hymenoptera only the female carries the sword, as in the case of the gilded wasp, gold striped over blue or red, who can project a long needle from her abdomen; the female philanthe, who is carnivorous, while the puerile unarmed male lives upon flower pollen. Not disdaining this natural dessert, the female philanthe will attack the nectar loaded bee with her great dart, stab him and pump out his crop. One may see the ferocious small animal knead the dead bee for half an hour, squeeze him like a lemon, drink him out like a gourd. Charming and candid habits of these winged topazes whirring among the flowers! Fabre has excused this sadique

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gourmandizing: the philanthe kills bees in order to feed her larvae, who have, however, so great a repugnance for honey that they die upon contact with it; it is therefore out of sheer maternal devotion that she intoxicates herself with this poison! All things are, in nature, possible. But it might not be unreasonable to say that if the larvæ of the philanthe hate honey, it is because their greatly honey loving mother has never allowed them a drop of it.

One of the rare cases of hymenoptera where the female appears inferior to the male is the mutille or ant spider. The male is larger, has wings and lives on flowers. The female is apteral, but provided with a noisy apparatus for attracting the male's attention. The male of the cynips of the oak apple, the terminal cynips, has a blond body with large diaphanous wings, the brown and black female is wingless. The male yellow cimbex slender, and brown with a spot of yellow, is so different from the round female with yellow belly and black head, that they were long thought of different species.

Ants like all social hymenoptera are, as one knows, divided into three sexes, winged males and females and wingless neuters. Fecundation takes place in the air; the lovers fly up, join, fall enlocked, a golden cloud which the death of the males disperses, while the females, losing their wings, re enter the house for egg laying. The workers or neuters are generally smaller, as noticeably in the great red wood ants, who dig their shelters in stumps. White ants or termites¹ show very accentuated dimorphism;

¹ These are nevroptera or pseudo nevroptera, but their habits bring them noticeably near to social hymenoptera.

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the female or queen having a head almost as large as that of a bee, a belly the thickness of one's finger, long in proportion, and growing to be fifteen times as large as the rest of her body. This sexual tub lays continuously without any let up at the speed of an egg per second. The male, as in Baudelaire's vision of the giantess, lives in the shadow of this formidable mountain of female power and luxury. Among the termites there is not a fourth sex but a fourth way of being sexless. There are soldiers as well as workers, the soldiers having powerful mandibles mounted on enormous heads. All the termite customs are extraordinary, and their conic nests reach a height having a relation to them that a house five or six hundred metres high would have to us.

Of mosquitoes and maringouin mosquitoes and all insects of that sort, the females alone prick and suck the blood of mammifers. The males live on flowers and tree trunks. One sees them in forest alleys and clearings, moving regularly as in army manúuvres, they are scouting, watching for females; as soon as a male has caught one he seizes her, and disappears up into the air where the union is accomplished. Only the male cricket has a noise machine, only the female a hearing mechanism, situated in her front legs. Likewise it is the male grasshopper who sounds. A love call? People say so, but there is no proof. Grasshoppers live, male and female in complete promiscuity lined up on the treebark; such a quantity of music is unnecessary, and moreover if the female grasshopper isn't deaf, she has an almost insensible hearing. It is probable that the song of insects and birds, if it is sometimes a love call, is

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more often only a physiological exercise, at once necessary and disinterested. Fabre, who lived all his life among the implacable noises of the Provençal countryside, sees in "the violin of the locust, in the bag pipe of the tree toad, in the cymbals of the cacan only a means suitable to expressing the joy of living, the universal joy which each animal species celebrates in its own fashion.¹ Why then is the female mute? It is certainly absurd and profoundly useless to summon, in almost uninterrupted song, from morn till eve, a companion whom one sees seated beside one pumping the juice out of a planetree; but it has perhaps not always been so. The two sexes may have had, in the past, habits more divergent. The plane tree which unites them in the same feeding ground has not always grown in Provence. The unending song may have been useful at a time when the sexes lived separate, and may have remained as evidence of ancient customs. It is moreover a commonly observed fact that activities long survive the period of their utility. Man and all animals are full of maniac gestures whose movement is only explicable on the hypothesis that it had once a different intention.

The female spider is nearly always superior to the male in size, industry, activity, and means of defence and attack. We will note their sexual habits later, but must observe here their particular cases of dimorphism. The Madagascar she epeire is enormous, very handsome, black, red, silver and gold. She rigs up a formidable web in her tree, near which one sees always a modest and puerile skein, the work of a minuscule male keeping an

¹ Souvenirs entomologiques, tome V. p. 256.

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anxious eye on the chance of sidling up to his terrible mistress, and risking his wedding death. The argyronete or water spider, returns the balance to the male, who is fatter, larger, and provided with longer limbs.

The male triumphs again, and more frequently, among coleoptera. The nasicorn scarab, so called most aptly because he carries on his head a long back bending arched horn, has all his chest solidly armoured; the female has neither horn nor cuirass. Everyone knows the flying stag or lucane (stag beetle, bull fly), enormous coleoptera which flies through the summer evening buzzing like a top. He is feared for the bold appearance of his long mandibles which branch like stag's horns and which the uninstructed take for dangerous pincers. He is the male, his war gear pure ornament, as he lives inoffensively by sucking tree sap. The much smaller females are devoid of warlike apparatus, they are very few in number, and it is in the excitement of searching for them that the male, whose life is short and who knows it, whirls like a maniac, and bangs himself into our trembling ears. Here again one divines animals who have changed their habits more quickly than their organs. The old pirate has kept his daggers and axes, but abandoned, no one knows why, to vegetarian diet, he has lost all power to use them, he is merely a stage super. But maybe this gear impresses the female? She cedes more willingly to this hector who gives her the illusion of strength, that is of the male's beauty.

The glow worm is a real worm, but a larva rather than a definitive animal. The male of this female is a perfect insect, provided with wings which he uses to

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seek in the darkness the female who shines more brightly as she more desires to be looked at and mounted. There is a kind of lampyre of which both sexes are equally phosphorescent, one in the air, the male, the other on the ground where she awaits him. After coupling they fade as lamps when extinguished. This luminosity is, evidently, of an interest purely sexual. When the female sees the small flying star descend toward her, she gathers her wits, and prepares for hypocrite defence common to all her sex, she plays the belle and the bashful, exults in fear, trembles in joy. The fading light is symbolic of the destiny of nearly all insects, and of many animals also; coupling accomplished, their reason for being disappears and life vanishes from them.

The male cochineal has a long body with very delicate wings, transparent and which at a distance look like those of a bee; he is provided with a sort of tail formed of two silky strands. One sees him flying over the nopals, then suddenly alighting on a female, who resembles a fat wood louse round and puffy, twice as stout as the male, wingless. Glued by her feet to a branch, with her proboscis stuck into it, continually pumping sap, she looks like a fruit, like an oak apple or oak gall on a peduncle for which reason Réaumur called her picturesquely the gall insect. In certain species of cocides the male is so small that his proportion is that of an ant strolling over a peach. His goings and comings are like those of an ant hunting for a soft spot to bite, but he is seeking the genital cleft, and having found it, often after long and anxious explorations, he fulfills his functions, falls off and dies.

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CHAPTER V

SEXUAL DIMORPHISM

II. Vertebrates:– Unnoticeable in fish, saurians, reptiles.– The Bird World.– Dimorphism favourable to males: the oriole, pheasants, the ruff.– Peacocks and turkey cocks.– Birds of paradise.– Moderate dimorphism of mammifers.– Effects of castration on dimorphism.

II. VERTEBRATES. Sexual differences are generally unnoticeable in fish, reptiles and saurians. They are accentuated when we come to superior vertebrates, to birds and mammals, but without ever attaining the extreme difference which characterizes a great number of arthropodes. In birds the disparity may be of colouring, size, or length, form and curliness of the feathers; among mammals, of shape, hair, beard or horns. Sometimes the female bird is finer and stronger; thus stronger and of more powerful wing spread in the case of the secretary, the buzzard, the falcon, the ash coloured vulture and many birds of prey; more beautiful as in the Indian turnices.¹ One of them, the gray phalarope, solves woman's dream in favour of the female, leaving her the brilliant colours; the male contents himself with more

¹ Bird, rather like quail.

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sober clothing and, not being able to lay, assumes at least the further maternal cares: sitting on the eggs.

In general, nature is, in the bird world, favourable to the male. He is a prince whose wife appears morganatic. Often smaller, as the female canepetiere (a sort of bustard),while the female garden warbler is nearly always clothed as Cinderella. The birds which women have massacred in millions in order to deck themselves as parrots and jays, are male birds for the most part; their sisters bear more modest clothing, and one would say that this humility, become favourable to their species, had been developed by nature in provision of human stupidity and badheartedness. The gold yellow oriole with black wings and tail, has for mate a brown sparrow with grey and greenish touches. The silver pheasant (a false pheasant) has a black tuft standing up from his silver white nape, his neck and back are of the same metal; his dark belly has a blue shimmer, his beak is blue, his cheeks red, and his feet, red. The smaller female covers her belly sadly in a whitish chemise, her back is russet. In the true pheasant the dimorphism is still more marked. The large, proud male (we are dealing with the common pheasant) who has no objection to being admired, is deep green on nape and neck, copper red with violet shimmer on back, flanks, belly and breast; his tail russet with black bands, a reddish brown tuft spreads from his head, and the eye circle is vivid red. The much smaller female has an earthy plumage speckled with black. The fair Golden Pheasant is really all golden over green. His yellow tail and wings and his saffron red belly complete this marvellous masculine

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splendour. The female must content herself with burnt sienna back covering which comes down onto her ochre coloured belly.

A little head projecting from an enormous neck circle of white out puffing feathers, middle sized body, and long legs. It is the combatant (ruff bird). One must add a tapering beak, ornamented at the base by a sort of red grape. One can't say what colour the male is, he is of all colours. One leaves him white, and finds him red; he was black, and is violet; later he will be speckled or banded in most varied hues. His ruff is an ornament and a defence; he loses both it and his red grape With the passing of his fighting and loving season. This instability of feathering accords curiously with the instability of his character; no animal is more irritable or cantankerous. One can not keep him captive save solitary and in obscurity. The female, somewhat less turbulent never changes her vestment, an invariable gray, with a small amount of brown on the back.

Peacocks and turkey cocks alone can spread wheel wise their fan tails, as also the cock bustard; they alone are provided with great wattles. The ménure hen lifts, as the cock, a Iyre of feathers, but it is a tarnished and mediocre imitation of her master's, which glistens in all shades rising and curving with such paradoxical grace.

The dimorphism of birds of paradise is even more marked than in the preceding cases. Nape citron yellow, throat green, forehead black, back in burnt chestnut, the cock's tail has two long plumes, his flanks two fine tapering feathers of yellow orange marked in red, which he can spread branching or draw in at will; the dim

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female is without ornament. The sifilet, a bird related to the birds of paradise has, fixed between eye and ear a pair of fine plumes twice the length of his body, which float as he walks like white blue shimmering streamers. It is a lover's paraphernalia, which the female in consequence does without, while the male loses his after mating.

The dissemblance of barnyard cock and hen are well enough known to give everyone a clear idea of dimorphism in birds and to show difference of characters parallel with difference of form.

The dimorphism of mammals is even less often favourable to the female than is that of birds. One can cite but the sole example of the American tapir where the male is smaller than the female.1 The contrary is nearly always the case. Sometimes the two sexes have an identical appearance: cougars, cats, panthers, servals. If there is a rule, it is difficult to formulate, for side by side with these felines without sexual dimorphism, the sex of lions and tigers clearly determines their forms.

Among mammifers there are bizarre resemblances and baroque differences. The he and she mole, at first sight, appear the same even to their exterior sexual organs, the female's clitoris is, like the male's penis, perforated to let the ureter pass through it. But here, as we shall see later, the morphologic resemblance by no means indicates similarity of characters; the female mole is excessively female. There is baroque difference of sexes in the capped seal of Greenland and Terra Nova. The male can puff out his head skin into an enormous

'Translator's note. O sinistre continent.

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helmet. To what purpose? Possibly to scare naïve enemies. True to her rôle of protege the female can not throw this bluff, which is used by Chinese warriors, by certain insects like the mantis and by the cobra among serpents.

She brown bears and she kangaroos are smaller than males. In all the deer tribes save reindeer the male alone is horned, and this is the by no means ridiculous origin of a very old joke, for the does are lascivious and are pleased to receive the attentions of a number of males. The difference of bull and cow is distinct enough, that of stallion and mare less so, diminishing still further between dog and bitch, and being almost null among cats. In all cases where the dimorphism is slight, and is the direct consequence of the possession of sexual organs, castration inclines the male toward the female type.¹ This is as apparent in cattle as in eunuchs or gelded horses. One may see in this yet another proof of the primitivity of the female, since the abstraction of testicles suffices to give the male that softness of form and character which typifies females. Masculinity is an augmentation, an aggravation of the normal type represented by femininity; it is a progress, and in this sense it is a development. But this reasoning, good for mammals, would be detestable among insects, where the accentuation of type is nearly always furnished by the female. There are no general laws in nature, unless they be those which regulate all matter. With the birth of life,

¹ Castration of females seems, at least, among humans, to bring them nearer the male type. Effects of castration vary, necessarily, according to the age of the subject.

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the unique tendency diverges at once upon multiple lines. Perhaps we must throw this point of divergence still further back, for a metal like radium seems to differ from other metals as much as an hymenopter from a gasteropod.

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CHAPTER VI

SEXUAL DIMORPHISM

III. Vertebrates (continued).– Man and woman.– Characteristics and limits of human dimorphism.– Effects of civilization.– Psychologic dimorphism.– The insect world and the human.– Modern dimorphism, basis of the pair.– Solidarity of the human pair.– Dimorphism and polygamy.– The pair favours the female.– Sexual æsthetics.– Causes of the superiority of feminine beauty.

III. VERTEBRATES (continued)÷Man and woman.÷ Among primates sexual dimorphism is but little accentuated, especially when the male and female live the same life in the open a ir and sh are the sa m e labours. The male gorilla, very strong and very pig headed flees from no enemy; the female on the contrary is almost timid: when surprised in company with the male, she cries out, gives the alarm and escapes. But attacked when alone with her offspring, she resists. . One can easily distinguish the male and female orang outang, the male is larger with longer more bristling hair, he alone has a Horace Greeley beard; in the female the patches of bald skin are much less callous. But the great difference between the

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sexes in gorilla and orang outang is in the males having vocal sacks descending over the chest to the arm pits.

Thanks to these air reservoirs, these bag pipe bags, inflatable at will, the male can howl for a very long time and with great violence; the females' sacks are very small. Other monkeys, notably howling apes, are provided with these air chambers, as are also certain other mammifers well known for the extravagance of their cries: polecats and pigs. Birds and batrachians have analogous organs.

Dimorphism of men and women varies according to race or rather according to species. Very feeble in most blacks and reds it is accentuated among Semites, Aryans, and Finns. But in man as in all animals of separate sexes one must differentiate between the primary dimorphism, which is necessary and produced by the specialization of sexual organs, and the secondary dimorphism with which the relation of sex is less evident or wholly uncertain. Limited to the non sexual elements, human dimorphism is very feeble. Almost null in infancy, it develops with approaching puberty, is maintained during the genital period, and diminishes, sometimes almost to vanishing point, in old age. It varies individually, even during the years of greatest reproductivity, in males feebly sexed and in women heavily sexed: that is to say there are men and women whose type closely approaches the type ideal formed by the fusion of sexes; neither one nor the other escapes the radical dimorphism imposed by the difference of sexual organs.

Leaving aside exceptions, one observes a mediocre and constant dimorphism between men and women, so

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which may be expressed as follows, taking the male for type: the female is smaller and has less muscular force, she has longer head hair, but in contrast the hair system is very little developed over the rest of her body, excepting in the armpits and pubis; aside from the teats, belly and hips, whose form is sexual, she is normally fatter than the male, and in direct consequence of this, her skin is finer; her skull capacity is inferior by about 15% (man=100; woman=85) and her intelligence, less spontaneous, inclines in general to activities entirely practical. There is hardly any difference in the male and female skulls of every inferior human species, the contrary is true of civilized races. Civilization has certainly accentuated the initial dimorphism of man and woman÷ at least unless one of the very conditions of civilizations be not precisely a notable difference, morphologic and psychologic, between the two sexes. In that case civilization has but accentuated a native dimorphism. This is more probable, for one does not see how civilization could have caused the dimorphism, not at least unless it had already existed as a very strong tendency. Identical work, the same utilization of instinctive activities have managed greatly to reduce dimorphism of forms, for example, in dogs and horses, but this has had no influence on the psychologic dimorphism. Cultivation of instinct has never been able to efface, in the most specialized breeds of dogs, the peculiar tonality which instinct receives from sex. It is improbable that intellectual culture could fashion women in such a way as to rid them of the characteristic colour which sex imparts to their intelligence.

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One uses the words instinct and intelligence to flatter prejudiced people. Instinct is merely a mode of intelligence.

Dimorphism is a constant fact in the animal series. Favourable to the male, favourable to the female, indiffer ent, it starts always from sexual necessity. There is a job to be done: nature divides it equally, or not, between male and female. She knows neither justice nor equality, and lays heavy burdens upon some, even to mutilation and premature death, while she gives to others liberty, leisures, and long hours of pleasant life. It is necessary that the couple reproduce a certain number of beings, equals of the unities of which itself is formed: all means are good which attain this end, and which attain it most speedily and most surely. Nature who is pitiless, is also in a hurry. Her imagination, always active, invents, ceaselessly, new forms which she casts into life, in measure as the earlier born finish their cycle. In superior mammals, and particularly in human species, division of labour is the means used by nature to insure the perpetuity of types. The female insect (leaving aside for the moment social hymenoptera) is provided at once with the organs of her sex and with tools of her trade, with arms for guarding the race; the female human has ceded to man the tools and weapons, here merged in the one instrument, muscle. Or rather, keeping her rights to the instrument, she gives up the use of it. She is neither warrior, huntress, nor mason, nor butcher; she is the female, and the male is the rest. The division of labour supposes community. In order that the female may cede the cares for subsistence and defence to the

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male, the couple must be established and permanent. The male osmie (sort of solitary bee) sees the light before his female; he could prepare the nest, or at least choose its situation, guide the female to it, work or watch; but he belongs to a series of animals in which the males are merely male organs, and all his rôle is contained in the gestures of mating. The couple is not yet formed. When it is formed, as in other kinds of insects, scarabs, copris, sisyphs, geotrupes, the work is equally shared between the two sexes. Here the parallel ends, for the social evolution of the insect has led to functional differentiations extremely complicated, and if not unknown, at least abnormal, to humanity. Bee society has the female for base, human society has the couple. They are organisms so different that no comparison of them is possible, or even useful. Only in ignorance of them, can one envy bees; a community without sexual relations is really without attraction for a member of the human community. The hive is not a society but a hatchery.

The couple is only possible with a dimorphism, real but moderate. There must be a difference, especially of strength, in order for there to be a true union, that is to say subordination. A couple formed of equal elements, like a society of equal elements, would be in a state of permanent anarchy; two creatures suffice for anarchy, as for war. A couple formed of elements too unequal, would, by the crushing of the weaker, find itself reduced to tyrannized unity. Man and woman, as is the case with other primates and the carnivore (for most herbivore are polygamous) represent two sexes made to

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live united and to share jointly in the cares for their offspring. The state of couple, demanding a certain dimorphism, assures by it, its perpetuity. When the couple is dissolved, be it by polygamy or by promiscuity, as has happened among Mohammedans, and among Christians (a religion, long powerful, functions both as race and as milieu) the dimorphism is accentuated, each of the elements escapes, in some measure, the strict influence of the other sex. Likewise if, in consequence of identical education, the psychologic dimorphism is attenuated, even slightly÷it never is attenuated more than slightly÷ or if physical games reduce a little the physical differences, the couple is less easily formed and grows less stable: hence adultery, divorces, excess of prostitution. In all monogamous society, prostitution is the strict consequence: it diminishes more or less in polygamous societies where the free women are rarer, it would only disappear completely in promiscuity, that is to say in universal prostitution.

Polygamy, apart from its indirect influence, has, by the internment of women, a direct one on the dimorphism. Set apart from the active life of the outer world, and even from the air and light, the female of the male polygamous human becomes whiter, whatever may have been her initial colour, fatter, heavier, and also more stupid and more addicted to all sorts of onanism. Among Indian Mussulmen the man and woman appear to belong to different species, the man being so tanned, and the woman so colourless. Shut in prostitutes of the occident also lose colour, and one would with difficulty recognize two sisters in the soft, bleached whore and the

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sun reddened, hardy cow girl. Woman's liberty also accentuates the dimorphism but by another process. Freed from the bridle of necessity, from the need of pleasing, woman escaped from the couple, exaggerates her feminism, she becomes again the female in excess, since it is in being more and more female that she has most chances of seducing the male, who is insensible to all other merit. And, inversely, a woman having man's education is, given equal beauty, less than any other a seductress.

Thus, while the disintegration of the couple augments the feminine dimorphism, the diminution of the natural dimorphism renders the transformation of the couple more uneasy and more precarious. The human couple is an harmony difficult to realize, very easy to destroy, but in measure as one destroys it one frees the elements which will, necessarily, re-create it. (We will return later to polygamy, human and animal; but must here examine its relation to dimorphism. All the questions treated in this book are, moreover, so interlocked, that it will be difficult to prevent one or other of them from cropping up apropos no matter what other. If the method is less clear it is perhaps more loyal. Far from wishing to impart human logic to nature, one attempts here to introduce a little natural logic into the old classic logic.)

The sole aim of the couple is to free the female from all care that is not purely sexual, to permit her the most perfect accomplishment of her most important function. The couple favours the female, but it favours also the race. It is fully beneficial when the woman has acquired the right of maternal laziness. There is another reason

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for believing in the legitimacy of such a sharing of useful work between the two members of the couple, it is that masculine work diminishes its femininity, while feminine work feminizes the males. In order that the necessary and moderate dimorphism persist it would be necessary if the woman is to take up male exercises that the male should assume all the accessory labours of maternity. This would not be contrary to supple natural logic; there are examples of it among batrachiansand among birds. But one does not see clearly either the utility or the possibility of such a reversal of rôles in the human species. The duty of a being is to perse vere in its being and even to augment the character istics which specialize it. The duty of woman is to keep and to accentuate her æsthetic and her psychologic dimorphism. The aesthetic viewpoint obliges one for the thousandth time to put, but, happily, not to resolve the agreeable question of woman's beauty. One may judge when it is a matter of shape, of muscular energy, of respiratory amplitude: these can be measured and set down in figures. When it comes to beauty, it is a matter of feeling, that is to say of what is at once deep est and most personal in each one of us, and which is most variable between one man and another. However, the sexual element which enters into the idea of beauty, being here at its very root, since it is the question of woman, the opinion of men is nearly unanimous: in the human couple, it is woman who represents beauty. All contrary opinion will be for ever considered as a paradox or as the most boring of sexual aberrations. A feeling does not adduce its reasons, it has none. It

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has to have them lent to it. The superiority of feminine beauty is real, it has a sole cause, the unity of line. What makes woman the more beautiful is the invisibility of her genital organs. The male organ, which is sometimes an advantage, is always a load, and always a blemish; it is made for the race, not for the individual. In the male human, and precisely because of its erect attitude, the sex is the sensitive point par excellence, and the visible point, it is the point of attack in hand to hand struggle, point of aim for the jet, obstacle for the eye, be it as a roughness of surface, be it as a break in the middle of the line. The harmony of the female body is then geometrically, much more perfect, especially if one consider the male and the female at the very hour of desire, at the moment, that is, when they present the most intense and most natural expression of life. In the woman, all movements are interior, or visible only in the undulation of her curves, conserving thus her full aesthetic value, while the man, seeming at once to recede toward the primitive states of animality, appears reduced, putting off all beauty, to the bare and simple condition of genital organ. Man, it is true, has his aesthetic compensation during pregnancy and its deformations.

One must admit also that the human form has grave defects of proportion, and that they are more accentuated in the female than in the male. In general the trunk is too long, and the legs, consequently, too short. One says that there are two aesthetic types in Aryan races: one with long limbs and one with short limbs. Both types are indeed, easy enough to distinguish, but they

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rarely present their characteristics with sufficient distinction, moreover the first is rather rare: it is the one which sculptors have vulgarized by amelioration. Compare a series of photographs of art with a series of photos from the nude, and you have proof enough that the beauty of the human body is an ideologic creation. Take away the egoistic sentiment of the race, and the sexual delirium, and man would appear very inferior in harmonic plentitude to most of the mammifers, the monkey, his brother, is, frankly inæsthetic.

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CHAPTER VII

SEXUAL DIMORPHISM AND FEMINISM

Inferiority and superiority of the female as shown in animal species.– Influence of feeding on the production of sexes.– The female would have sufficed.– Feminism absolute, and moderate.– Pipe dreams: elimination of the male and human parthenogenesis.

ONLY after serious study of sexual dimorphism in the animal series may one venture a few reflections on feminism. One has noticed, in certain species, the female more beautiful, stronger, more active, more intelligent; and one has noticed the opposite. One has seen the male larger, or smaller; one has seen and will see him parasite, or provider, permanent master of the couple or the group, fugitive lover, a slave sacrificed by the female after the completion of her pleasure. All attitudes, and the same ones, are attributed by nature to either of the sexes; there is not, apart from the specific functions, a male or a female rôle. Both or either according to the decalogue of their specie put on the same costume, don the same mask, wield the same boar spear, tool or sabre without one's being able to discover, at least not without going back to the beginning of things and digesting the archives of life, which of them is disguised and which acts "according to nature."

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The abundance of food, especially nitrogenized (? azotized) will produce a greater number of females. With certain animals at transformation one may act directly on individuals: tadpoles gorged on mixed food, vegetables, larvae, chopped meat, have given an excess of females approaching totality (95 females to 5 males). On the other hand over feeding tends to abolish stamens in plants, the stamens turn into petals, suralimentation even moults the petals into leaves and the buds into shoots. Richness of means, well being, intensive feeding abolish sex, but the last to be affected is the female, which in sum, perseveres obscurely in the unsexed plant, forced back to its primitive means of reproduction, or to reproduction by slip cutting. If excessive alimentation tends to suppress the male, it would then appear that the separation into two sexes is a means of diminishing the costs of the total being. The monoic type is a step toward this simplification of labour; the female at a given moment eliminates her male organ, refuses to feed it, frees herself from the burden which has only a momentary utility. And, following this, provided in herself with an overabundance of all that maintains life, she divests herself of the specialized sexual apparatus, unsexes herself, that is to say, the identity of contraries being here evident, she is sexed throughout all her parts: tota femina sexus.

The male is an accident: the female would have sufficed. Brilliant as are, in certain animal species, the destinies of the male, the female is primordial. In civilized humanity she is born in proportion greater as the civilization approaches a greater plenitude; and this

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very plenitude diminishes, proportionately, the general fecundity: whether we treat of man or of apple trees, the male element in or de creases according to famine or abundance of nourishment. But the human race is not sufficiently plastic for the variation of births to be ever very great between the two sexes; and no warm blooded animal is sufficiently plastic for this cause, so active among vegetables, ever to lead to the dissolution of the male. There are no natural laws, there are tendencies, there are limits: the fields of oscillation are determined by the pasts of species, trenches curving into cloisters which close, in nearly all directions, the alleys of the future.

It is a fact, from henceforth hereditary, that the male of the human species has centralized in himself most of the activities independent of the sexual motor. He alone is capable of disinterested works, that is to say of aims unconnected with the physical conservation of the race, but without which civilization would be impossible, or at least very different from what it is and from the idea which we have of its future. Doubtless in humanity, as in the rest of nature, the female represents the important sex. In utter need, as with the mason bee, she could serve for the absolutely necessary work, to build the shelter, to gather the food, and the male might, without essential damage be reduced to the rôle of mere fecundating apparatus. The number of males could, and even should in such case, diminish with due rapidity, but then human society would in or de cline toward the type represented by that of social bees: continual labour being incompatible with the periods of maternity,

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the feminine sex would atrophy, a single female would be elevated to the dignity of queen and mother, the rest of the population would work stupidly for an ideal exterior to its own sensibility. Even more radical transformations would not be anti natural. Virgin birth might establish itself: certain males could be born in each century, as happens in the intellectual order, and they could fecundate the generation of loins, as genius fecundates the generation of minds. But humanity, by the richness of its intelligence, is less than other animal species submitted to causal necessity; by constant squirming in its nets, it has managed to displace a cord here and there, and makes now and again the unexpected movement. The coming of males once in a century would be unnecessary if some mechanical device were found for exciting the life of woman's eggs, as one excites those of the sea anemone. If a few males were born from time to time, by an atavistic quirk of nature, they could be exhibited as curiosities, as we now exhibit hermaphrodites.

The feminist ideal leads us to these pipe dreams. But if it comes to destroying the couple and not to re forming it, if it comes to establishing a vast social promiscuity, if feminism resolves itself into the formula: free woman in free love, it is even more chimerical than all the chimæra which have at least their analogy in the diversity of animal habits. Human parthenogenesis is less absurd: it offers an order, and promiscuity is a disorder. But social promiscuity is impossible by the further reason that woman, the more feeble, would be crushed by it. She struggles against man only, thanks to the privileges

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which man concedes her, when troubled by sexual inebriety, intoxicated and drowsy with the fumes of desire. The factitious equality which she claims would re establish her ancient slavery, on the day when most or all women wish to enjoy it: that is still another possible solution of the feminist crisis. However one looks at it, one sees the human couple re establish itself ineluctably.

It is very difficult, from the standpoint of natural logic, to sympathize with moderate feminism, one could more easily accept feminism in excess. For if there are in nature numerous examples of feminism, there are very few of an equality of the sexes.

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CHAPTER VIII

LOVE ORGANS

Sexual dimorphism and parallelism.– Sexual organs man and of woman.– Constancy of sexual parallelism in the animal series.– External sexual organs of placentary mammifera.– Form and position of the penis.– The penial bone.– The clitoris.– The vagina.– The teats.– Forked prong of marsupials.– Sexual organs of reptiles.– Fish and birds with a penial organ.– Genital organs of arthropodes.– Attempt to classify animals according to the disposition presence, absence of exterior organs for reproduction.

SEXUAL dimorphism, physic as well as psychic, has evidently one sole cause, sex; nevertheless the organs which differ least from male and female among species which differ most, are precisely the sexual organs. That is, they are rigorously made the one for the other, and the accord in this case must be not only harmonic, but mechanical and mathematical. They are cog wheels which must bite one on the other with exactitude, be it, as in birds, that there is but an exact superposition of two orifices, be it, as in mammals that the key must enter the keyhole. There is a dimorphism, but it is that of the mould to the cast, of the scabbard to the blade; for the parts where the contact is less strict, the parallelism is

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nevertheless quite sensible and quite apparent. This similitude in difference has struck philosophers as well as anatomists in all ages from the logical insinuations of Aristotle to Geoffroy Saint Hilaire's theory of analogies. Galien had already noted certain analogies, more or less exact: greater labia, and foreskin, ovaries and testicles, scrotum and matrice. He says, textually: "All parts of man are found in woman; there is but one point of difference, woman's parts are interior, man's exterior, parting from the perineal region. Imagine those which first present themselves to mind, no matter which, unfold woman's or fold man's inward and you will find either a replica of the other. Suppose first man's organs pushed into him and extending interiorly between the rectum and the vessie; in this supposition the scrotum would occupy the place of the matrice, with the testicles placed at each side of the exterior orifice. The prong of the male would become the throat of the cavity thus produced, and the skin of the prong's extremity, called the foreskin would form the vagina. Suppose, inversely, that the matrice should turn inside out and fall outside, would not its testicles (ovaries) of necessity, find them selves inside its cavity and would not it envelop them as a scrotum? Would not the throat, hidden up to the perineum, become the male member, and the vagina, which is but a cutaneous appendix of the throat, the foreskin?" This is the passage which Diderot has trans posed and put au courant with science in his Rêve d Alembert. This page of literary anatomy retains its expressive value: "Woman has all man's parts, the sole difference is like that between a purse hanging out

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side a purse stuffed inside; a female fœtus resembles a male fœtus, so as to deceive anyone; the part which occasions the error, sinks in the female fœtus in measure as the purse extends inward; it is never obliterated to the point of losing its primitive form; it also is the mover of pleasure, it has its gland, its foreskin, and one notes at its extremity a point which appears to have been the orifice of a urinary canal which has closed; there is in man from the anus to the scrotum, the interval called the perinæum, and from the scrotum to the end of the prong, a seam which looks like the resewing of a basted vulva; women with excessive clitoris, have beards, eunuchs have not, their thighs increase, their hips widen, their knees round out, and in losing the characteristic organization of one sex they seem to return to the characteristic conformity of the other...." In terms less literary, one considers as homologous, in man and woman, the ovary and the testicle, lesser labia, clitoridian cap and sheath, the hanging foreskin; the greater labia and the envelope of the scrotum; clitoris and penis; the vagina and the prostatic utricle. One will find the details of these analogies in special works, they can not be given here with scientific precision. The sole point to hold on to is that the two sexes not only in man, and not only in mammifers, but in nearly all the animal and vegetable series, are but a repetition of the same creature with specialization of function. This specialization may extend to functions other than sexual, to work (bees, ants) to war (termites). The soldier termite is extraordinary; he is not more so than the male.

The sexual parallelism is constant among nearly all

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vertebrates and arthropodes; it extends to identity among hermaphrodite mollusks if one then compare not two sexes but two individuals. It extends, for each sex considered separately, along the whole zoological chain. Parting from link animals which separate into two parts, one sees the sexual organs design themselves in the form wherein they arrive in higher animals of great complexity, such that, in acquiring differences of form and position they retain a remarkable stability of structure; one would say almost of identity in marsupials, reptiles, fish, birds. For clarity one must proceed from the known to the unknown; man is the figure to whom one may compare necessarily the observations on other animals.

There is no lack of point in knowing the normal love mechanism, since moralists pretend to regulate its movements. Ignorance is tyrannic; the inventors of natural ethics knew very little of nature: this permitted them to be severe; for no definite piece of knowledge interfered with the certitude of their gestures. One becomes more discreet when one contemplates the prodigious picture of the erotic habits of the animal world, and even entirely incompetent to decide flatly, yes or no, whether a fact is natural or unnatural.

Man is a placentary mammifer: by this title his genital organs and their mode of employ are common to him and to all hairy animals having teats and an umbilicus. He is not normally covered all over with hair, but there is hardly a spot on his body where hairs may not sprout, and both sexes are hairy often with extreme abundance in pubis and arm pits. The male and active

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organ of mammifers is the penis, usually completed exteriorly by the testicles. The penis is, at once, the excreting conductor of urine and sperm; an analogous relation exists in the female, and it is with exactitude that these mingled organs have been called genito urinary or more recently, uro genital; it is the same in all the animal series, the urethra opens exteriorily or it ends, as in birds, in a cloaca, vestibule, for all the excretions.

The penis of two handed (bimanous) creatures descends freely, it hangs before the pubis in quadrumanes, and in chiroptera (bats). The bat is strangely like man, and like primates in general: five fingers to the hand, one a thumb, five fingers on the foot, pectoral teats, mensual flux, free penis; it is a little caricature of man, abrupt and frightened in its evening flight about houses. Among flesh eaters, ruminants, pachyderms, solipedes and several other families of mammals, the penis is sheathed in a scabbard which stretches along the belly; thus preserved against accidents and insect stings, while its sensibility is maintained intact. Voyagers, according to Buffon, have seen Patagonians trying to get like results by tying the foreskin above the gland, like a bag with a cord. Thus man's hand permits him to improve or mutilate his body. Mutilation and sexual deformations, circumcision among Semites and savages, excision of Russian illuminati, transversal perforation of the gland, surgical flattening of the prong, are very frequent. The hand of the chiroptera is shackled, that of quadrumanes has only one sexual rôle, masturbation. It may also serve as a shield against external danger; many quadrumanes, better protected, make the same use

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of their tail when they curl it between their legs, this is sometimes a psychological gesture, female modesty or refusal, sometimes a gesture of preservation. The movements of Venus modest, of man coming naked from his bath, have no other origin. Monkeys when they stop moving about, place their hands on their sexual parts. The Polynesians, before Christianity, had the custom when standing upright, of holding their scrotum in both hands with the prong hanging between the fingers: the posture of the wild dandy. Certain species lack scrotum as Pliny had already remarked: Testes elephanto occult,. In camels the testicles roll beneath the skin of the groin; rats' testicles are internal, but emerge in the rutting season and assume an enormous development. Apes often have the pouch skin blue, red or green, like the other bald parts of their bodies.

Camels, dromedaries and cats have the end of the penis bent backward (this explains the tom cat's manner of urination), the tip does not straighten itself or point forward save in erection. Not only the prong but the sheath of rodents points backward and ends near the anus and in front of it. The penis is slender in ruminants, and in wild boar; thick and round in solipedes, elephant, lamentin (sea cow, manatee); thick and conic in the dolphin, cylindrical in rodents and primates. The gland, which takes all intermediary forms between ball and point, has in the rhinoceros the shape of a gross fleur de lys. In the cats small spikes rise and point toward the base, and in agouti and gerboa there are holding flanges which grip the organs of the female.

The prong of many mammifers, a real member, is held

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up by an interior bone, formed at the cost of the conjunctive partition which separates the two hollow chambers. This penial bone is found in many quadrumanes, chimpanzees, orang outangs, most carnivore, dogs, wolves, felines, martin, otter, badger, among rodents, beaver, seal, and cetaceous animals; it is lacking in ruminants, pachyderms, insectivore, toothless animals. In man one sometimes finds a trace of it in the form of a slender prismatic cartilage. In the enormous penis of the whale it resembles a bell clapper. The penial bone diminishes the erectile capacity of the prong in stopping the development of the hollow chambers, but it assures the rigidity of the member, obtained in the other penial type by the inflow of blood which causes the swelling. Man ought to have the penial bone; he has lost it in the course of ages, and this is doubtless fortunate, for a permanent rigidity, or one too easily obtained would have increased, to madness, the salacity of his species. It is perhaps for this reason that great apes are rare, although they are strong and agile. This view would be confirmed if the penial cartilage were found regularly in very lustful men or with a certain frequency among human races most addicted to eroticism.

The penis is found in woman in the form of clitoris. This is almost as voluminous as a true penis in quadrumanes; it is atrophied in other species. It varies individually in women, certain of them being in this respect quadrumanes. Sometimes the clitoris is pierced for the passage of the urethra (certain apes and the mole); a slight trace of this meatus is seen at the head of the woman's clitoris. In species whose males possess a

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penial bone the female has often a clitoridian bone; nothing more clearly affirms the parallelism of these two organs, whereof one serves only for pleasure, after having been, perhaps in a long distant era, when man romped among marine invertebrates, a real instrument of fecundation. The greater labia, limiting the general orifice of the vulva, exist only in woman and, less markedly, in the female orang outang. Circular in rodents, transversal in the unique case of the hyena, a heteroclite animal, the vulva is longitudinal in all other mammifers. Completely imperforate in the mole the vagina is more or less closed by a membrane, which the male penis tears in first encounter, in women, and several quadrumanes, certain small monkeys, the marmoset, certain carnivore the bear, hyena, white bellied seal, the daman (nailed); it is replaced in dog, cat, ruminants by an annular gripping between the vagina and the vestibule. The maidenhead is, therefore, not peculiar to human virgins, and there is no glory in a privilege which one shares with the marmoset.

Menstruation is found in quadrumanes, in bats; other female mammals show an emission of blood, which is, however, limited to the rutting season. The position of teats is variable, as also their number, they are in the groin in ruminants, solipedes, cetaces; ventral in dogs, pigs; pectoral and always two in nearly all primates, chiroptera, elephants, and sirenians, who for this reason, doubtless, reminded the sailors of the ancient world of their women.

Other particularities and correspondences are examined in the next chapter which deals with the mechanism of

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love, and the method used by divers animals to make use of their organs according to the commandment of nature. There remain for consideration the lesser mammals and other vertebrates whose fecundatory instruments resemble those of mammifera.

In man and other placentaires, the forked prong is a teratological fact only encountered in incomplete double monsters. It is, on the contrary, the most general form among marsupials. A double vagina corresponds to this penis, double at least from the gland, thus in kangaroo and opossum. This original biparity is found regularly in the uterus of certain placentaires, hares, rats, bats, carnivore. The uterus of marsupials is simple without narrowing of the throat. One knows that their young stay there but a short time, that they are born not as fœtus but as germs, and complete their development in the marsupial pouch. An opossum, destined to attain about the size of a cat, is at birth about bean size. These animals, therefore, differ profoundly from other mammifera.

Some reptiles, like crocodiles and most chelonians, have only a simple prong; some tortoises have a forked tip to the penis, it is many branched in the trionix, carnivorous tortoise rightly called ferocious. The saurians and ophidians can deploy outside the cloaca two erectile prongs; in saurians, lizard's, they are short, round and bristle with prickles. The females have no clitoris save when the male has a single prong; at least the clitoris is only well constituted in crocodilians and chelonians.

Copulation is unknown to batrachians, whose contact

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is nevertheless very close; it is unknown to most fish, whose amours are without even contact. Certain selacians however (dogfish, skates), and perhaps also one or two teleostians (bony fish), and the lamprey, have a copulating organ which really enters the organ of the female.

The birds which have a penis or an erectile and retractile tubercle which serves, are the ostrich, the cassowary, the duck, the swan, the goose, the bustard, the mandou and certain neighbouring species; their hens have a clitoridian organ. The ostrich has a true prong, five or six inches in length, cut by a groove which serves as conduit for the seminal liquor; it is enormous in erection and tongue shaped. The ostrich hen has a clitoris and coition occurs exactly as among mammals. The swan and duck are also very well provided with an erectile tubercle suited for copulation, and this explains at once the story of Leda, the libidinous reputation of the duck, and his exploits in the barn yards, veritable abbeys of Thélème.

One can not here describe the copulative organs of arthropodes, comprising insects properly so called. Enough to note that, however varied their forms, they behave very much as those of superior mammifers and are composed of two essential parts, the penis, sheathed in a penial scabbard, and the vagina, prolonged by the copulative pouch which receives the penis. Fish and birds, lacking external apparatus are reduced to methods which will be later examined. Hermaphrodite mollusks, with a marvellously complicated sexual apparatus, ought

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also to be studied separately. Finally, the amorous habits of insects form a series of illustrative chapters.

From here, taking count only of exterior male organs or of organs which, internal when at rest, emerge at the moment of coïtion, one may attempt a vague and new classification of animal series.

I. Presence of penis, or of an erectile copulating tubercle: placentary mammals from man to marsupials exclusively; certain runners and palmipedes; crocodilians, chelonians , certain selacians, arthropodes, the rotifera.

2. Presence of a forked penis: marsupials, saurians, chelonians; scorpionides.

3. Disjunction of the secreting apparatus from the copulating apparatus: spiders, dragon flies.

4. Absence of penis, copulation by contact: monotremes (ornithoryncus), birds, batrachians, crustaceans.

5. No copulation; exterior fecundation of eggs: fish, echinoderms.

6. Indirect transmission of sperm with or without contact (by the spermatophore): cephalopodes, orthoptera.

7. Hermaphrodism: mollusks, tuniciers, worms.

8. Monagamous reproduction: protozoaires, and certain of the last metazoaires.

One needs many discriminations and exceptions to make this table more precise. It is however, not untrue, although incomplete and lacking nuances, and it permits one to see: that the separation of sexes by well characterized copulating apparatus is not a sign of animal superiority, although it is found among the most gifted animals; that birds with their genital system merely

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sketched in, seem to represent a type elevated in nature by the simplicity of organs and it means: that the sexes in animals who are without copulation either profound or superficial, tend, as in fish, to remain without difference; that all other modes of copulation are attributed exclusively to inferior species; that hermaphrodism was but a trial limited to a category of creatures lacking everything not exclusively designed for the process of reproduction; that the absence of sex characterizes only the earliest forms of life.

If one considers no longer the mode of copulation but the apparatus itself, with the male part, penis, and the female part, vagina, one sees clearly that these extremely particular organs are hardly found well designed save in two great branchings where the intelligence is most developed: mammifera and the arthropodes. There might be, perhaps, a certain correlation between complete and profound copulation and the development of the brain.

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CHAPTER IX

THE MECHANISM OF LOVE

I. Copulation: vertebrates.– Its very numerous varieties and its specific fixity.– The apparent immorality of Nature.– Sexual ethnography.– Human mechanism.– Cavalage.– The form and duration of coupling in divers mammifers.– Aberrations of sexual surgery, the ampallang.– Pain as a bridle on sex.– Maidenhead.– The mole.– Passivity of the female.– The ovule, psychological figure of the female.– Mania of attributing human virtues to animals.– The modesty of elephants. – Coupling mechanism in whales, seals, tortoises.– In certain ophidians and in certain fish.

I. COPULATION: VERTEBRATES. Forberg's "Figuræ Veneris" exhausts in forty eight illustrations the manners of coupling accessible to the human species; the erotic manuals of India imagine certain further variants and voluptuous perfectionings, but many of these juxtapositions are unfavourable to fecundation, and a majority of them have only been invented in order to escape too logical and too material a result. Animals surely, the most liberated as well as the most stupid, are ignorant of all modes of conjugal fraud; needless to say no dissociation can be made in their rudimentary minds be tween the sexual sensation and the maternal, between

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sexual and paternal sensation, much less. The ingenuity of each specie is small, but the universal ingenuity of total fauna is immense, and there are few human imaginings among those which we term perverse and even monstrous which are not the right and the norm in one or another region of animal empire. Practices very analogous to (although very different in aim from) divers onanist practices, to spermatophagia, even to sadism are imposed on innocent beasts and represent for them familial virtue and chastity. A physician, who has not obtained much glory thereby, invented or proposed artificial fecundation: he was imitating spiders and dragonflies; M. de Sade liked to imagine ruttings where blood and sperm flowed simultaneously; mere kindergarten manual (Berquinade) if one contemplate, not without bewilderment, the habits of an ingenious orthopter, the praying mantis, the insect which prays to God, la prego Diou as the Provençals call her, the prophetess as the Greek said! Baudelaire's verses ridiculing those who wish

"aux choses de l'amour mêler l'honnêteté"
Mix seemliness into affairs of Love

have a value not only moral but scientific. In love every thing is just, everything is noble, as soon as, among the maddest animals, it is a play moved by the desire of creating. It is more difficult doubtless to justify fantasies which are merely for the purpose of avoiding trouble, especially if one allow oneself to be blinded by the idea of specific finality; one may however affirm, and one will say nothing more about the matter, that animals are not ignorant either of sodomy or of onanism and that they

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cede to them by necessity, in the absence of females. Sénancour written wise and bold pages upon these practices among humans.

Sexual ethnography hardly exists. The scattered data on this subject, though extremely important, have not been co ordinated. That would be a small matter. They have not even been verified. One knows nothing of coital practices save what life teaches one, questions of this sort being difficult to ask, and answers being always equivocal. There is here an entire science which has been corrupted by Christian prudery. An order was issued long ago and is still obeyed; one has concealed all that unites, sexually, man and animal, everything that proves the unity of origin for all that lives and feels. Physicians who have studied this question have known only the abnormal, the malady: it would be imprudent to base conclusions on general practices from their observations. The best source, at least for Europeans, is still the casuist writings. From the enumeration of sins against chastity gathered by professional confessors, one could, after some study, deduce the secret sexual habits of civilized humanity. But one must take care not to retain either the old idea of sin, or the idea of the same under modern cloak, of fault, crime or error. Practices common to an entire ethnic group can not be judged to be other than normal, it matters little whether they have been stigmatized by the apologists of right living. What is good is what is and what will continue to be. It is known that bimanes and quadrumanes are very libertine, and that this is in accord with their physical suppleness and their intelligence. It is a fact undeniable and insurmountable, even

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if annoying. The human couple has drawn from this tendency a thousand erotic fantasies, which, in being disciplined have ended in the creation of a veritable sexual method, be it disinterested pleasure, be it preservation against fecundity; is this of no importance? How can one lecture about depopulation if one lose sight of this primordial fact? What can normal or patriotic reasoning do against an instinct which has become or rebecome an intelligent and conscious practice, bound to what is deepest in human sensibility? It is very difficult, especially when dealing with man, to distinguish between normal and abnormal. What is the normal; what the natural? Nature ignores this adjective, and one has dragged out of her bosom many illusions, perhaps in irony, perhaps in ignorance.

It is not perhaps very useful to describe human cavalage, which is not strictly a cavalage, as the woman is attacked from the front. Veritable cavalage has been, as one knows, praised by Lucretius, although, it has, and this detracts nothing from its merits, an air frankly animal; it is the form of love called by the theologians more bestiarum and by Lucretius more ferarum which is the same thing:

Et quibus ipsa modis tractetur blanda voluptas,
Quoque permagni refers; nam more ferarum,
Quadrupedumque magis ritu, plerumque putantur
Concipere uxores, quia sic loca sumere possum,
Pectoribus positis, sublatis semina lumbis.

This mode, considered by Lucretius as the more favour able to fecundation, is that of most mammifers, of nearly all insects and of many animal families. Apes great and

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small know no other. The architecture of their bodies would make face to face copulation very difficult. One must not forget that their upright position is never more than momentary, even in orange and chimpanzees; are not much better equilibrated than bears, much less so than kangaroos, marmosets¹ and squirrels; even when they stand up one feels that they have four feet. Love among them is not free from the seasons, and although they are libidinous all the year, they do not seem fit for generation save through the weeks of their rutting time: then their genital organs acquire a permanent rigidity; the udders of the females, ordinarily as small as those of the males, only swell during this period. There is, therefore, a vast difference, from the sexual standpoint, between man and the great apes, his anatomic neighbours. Man even in the humblest species has mastered love and made it his daily slave, at the same time that he has varied the accomplishments of his desire and made possible its renewal after brief interval. This domestication of love is an intellectual work, due to the richness and power of our nervous system, which is as capable of long silences as of long physiological discourses, of action and of reflection. The brain of man is an ingenious master which has managed, without possessing any very evident superiority, to get out of the other organs work of the most complicated sorts, and most finely sharpened pleasures; its (the brain's) mastery is very feeble in quadrumanes and other animals; it is very strong in insects as will be explained in a following chapter.

¹ Here R. de G. uses the term marmotte; up to this the word I have translated marmoset has been ouistiti.

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One need not wait for a minute description of the exterior love mechanism of all animal species. It would be long, difficult and boresome. A few characteristic examples will be enough. The duration of the coition is extremely variable, even in superior mammals. Very slow for dogs, coupling is but a thunderclap for the bull, the ram's is called the "lutte" (strife). The bull merely enters and leaves, and it is a spectacle for philosophers, for one understands immediately that what drives the fiery beast at his female is not the lure of a pleasure too swift to be deeply felt, but a force exterior to the individual although included in his organism. By its long grievous duration the coition of dogs leads to analogous reflections

In triviis quum saepe canes discedere aventes
Diversi cupidine summis ex viribus tendunt.

÷Lucretius.

This is because the dog's penis contains a hollow bone giving passage to the urethra. Around this bone are gathered the erectile tissues whereof one, the node of the prong, swells disproportionately during coition and prevents the separation of the two animals after the act is accomplished. They remain a long time uncomfortable, not managing to free themselves until long after their desire has turned to disgust, grotesque and lamentable symbol of many a human liaison.

Our other familiar animal, the cat, is not more happy in his affections. His penis is indeed furnished with thorns, with horny papilla toward the tip, and the intromission as well as the separation is only accomplished

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with groans. What one hears at night are not cries of voluptuousness but of suffering, the howlings of a beast whom nature has caught in the trap. This does not prevent the female from being very enterprising; responding to the cries of the pursuing male she excites him in a hundred ways, biting at neck and belly with an insistence which has, they say, provided a metaphor in the erotic vocabulary. Biting the neck is much more curious, as it is of a much less direct intention. Bitches also bite the neck of the dog in prelude. For near the neck is situated the bulb, original knot of nerves governing the secret parts and the genital region.

The pain which accompanies sexual acts ought to be differentiated, with precision, from passive suffering. It is very possible (women can testify to the fact) that sighs and even cries emitted at such time are the expression of a mixed sensation, wherein joy has almost as great a part as suffering. We must not judge feline exclamations from the shrillness of timbre; tortured by the male prong the she cats howl, but they await the supreme benediction. The rigour of the first approaches is perhaps but the promise of deeper delights: at any rate some women have thought so.

One knows that a cat's tongue is rough: so is the tongue and all the mucous surfaces of negroes. This roughness of surface notably augments the genital pleasure, as men who have known regresses testify. It has been perfected. The Dyaks of Borneo pierce the extremity of the penis, through the navicular channel and fit into it a pin to both ends of which are attached tufts of stiff hair in the form of a brush. Before surrender the women by cer÷

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tain tricks and certain traditional gestures indicate the length of the brush desired. In Java one replaces this apparatus known as the ampallang, by a sheath of goat skin, more or less thick. In other countries there are incrustations of little pebbles, which give the gland the shape of an embossed mace; and these pebbles are sometimes replaced by tiny bells, so that the men make in running a sound like mules, and attentive women can judge their value according to the intensity of their sexual music. These customs, noted by de Paw among certain aborigines of America, have not been recently observed, doubtless because the Christian modesty of modern travellers has obliterated their eyes and ears at convenient moments. No custom is abolished save in the face of some other custom more useful to sensuality, and the imagination seems rather to advance than to recede in these matters. It is true that the inventors hide themselves, even in savage countries, sexual morality tending toward uniformity.

These artifices, which appear curious to us, have certainly been created at the instigation of women, since theirs is the profit of them. Males have submitted to them, happy no doubt to be delivered at the price of passing pain from the terrible lasciviousness of their females. Racked and flayed by such instruments the women ought, at least for a few days, to flee the male and brood in silence upon their luxurious memories. Chinese and Japs, whose women are likewise lascivious are familiar with analogous means; to dominate their companions they have also invented ingenious onanist methods which give them time to attend to their own

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affairs, while peace reigns over their hearthstones. In the strange dissemblance between human races the Aryans have, for the same purpose, made use of the religious check rein, of prayer, of the idea of sin, and finally of liberty, that is to say of the pleasure of vanity which bewilders the woman, and invites her to please someone else before satisfying herself.

Woman is not the only mammal for whom, apart from the peculiar form of the penis, the first approaches are painful; but there is perhaps no female who has better reason than the mole for fearing the male. Her vulva, exteriorly unperforated, is covered by hide, downy as that of the rest of her body; she must, to be fecundated, undergo a veritable surgical operation. One knows how these beasts live, burrowing in search of food, in long subterranean galleries, of which the wastage, pushed up here and there forms the mole ridge. In rutting time, forgetting his hunting, the male starts in quest of a female; as soon as he divines her, he starts digging in her direction, furiously excavating the hostile earth. Feeling herself hunted, the female flees. Hereditary instinct makes her tremble before the tool which shall open her belly, before the redoubtable gimlet armed penis which has perforated her mother and all her female ancestors. She flees, digs, as the male advances, cross hatching tunnels in which her persecutor may end by losing his way; but the male also is educated by heredity: he does not follow the female but circles round her, heads her off, ends by catching her in an impasse, and while she is still ramming her blind muzzle into the earth, he grips, operates, fecundates. Charming emblem of modesty, this

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small, soft, black pelted beast. What human virgin would show such constancy in the defence of her virtue? Who, alone in the night, in a subterranean palace, would use her hands to open the walls, all her strength to flee from her suitor? Philosophers have believed that sexual modesty was an artificial sentiment, fruit of civilizations: they did not know the mole's story, or any of the true stories in nature, for nearly all females are timorous, nearly all react, at the appearance of the male, in fear or in flight. Our virtues are never more than psychological tendencies, and the finest of them are those whose explanation we are forbidden to seek. Why is the she cat violent, the she mole timorous? Without doubt the she mole observes the rule, even in exaggerating its severity, but why the rule? There is no rule, there are nothing but facts which we group in modes perceptible to our intelligence, facts which are always provisory, and which a change of perspective can denaturize. The notion of a rule, the notion of a law, confession of our impotence to pursue a fact into the logical origins of its genealogy. The law is a fashion of speaking, an abbreviation, a point of rest. The law is half the facts plus one. Every law is at the mercy of an accident, an unexpected encounter; and yet, without the idea of law all would be mere night in our consciousness.

"The male," says Aristotle, in his Treatise on Generation, "represents the specific form, the female, the matter. She is passive, in so much as she is female; the male is active."

Sexual modesty is a fact of sexual passivity. The moment will come for the female to be in her turn active

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and strong, when she has been fecundated, and when she must give birth and food to the posterity of her race. The male then becomes inert; equable sharing of the expense of forces, just division of labour. This passivity of the female element is found again in the very figuration of animality, formed by the egg and the spermatozoide. One sees the play under the microscope: the egg waits, solid as a fortress or as a woman whom many men look on and covet; the little animals begin their attack, they besiege the enclosure, they butt it with their heads; one of them breaks the wall, he enters, and as soon as his tad pole tail passes the breach, the wound recloses. The entire activity of this embryonic female reduces itself to this gesture; the greater part of her great sisters know no other. Their free will nearly always consists in this: they receive one among the arrivals, without one's being able to know very well whether the choice is psychological or mechanical.

The female waits, or flees, which is but another way of waiting, the active way; for not only se cupit ante videnti but she desires to be taken, she wishes to fulfill her destiny. It is doubtless for this reason that, in species where the male is feeble or timid, the female resigns herself to an aggression demanded by care for future generations. In short, two forces are present, the magnet and the needle. Usually the female is the magnet, sometimes she is the needle. These are details of mechanism which do not modify the general march of the machine to its goal. At the origin of all feeling there is a fact irreducible and incomprehensible in itself. Common reasoning starts from the feeling to explain the fact; this gives the absurd

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result of making thought run in a set track, like a horse in a circus. Kantian ignorantism is the masterpiece of these training exercises, where, starting from the categoric stable the learned quadruped necessarily thither returns having jumped through all the paper disks of scholastic reasoning. Observers of animal habits fall regularly into the prejudice of attributing, regularly, to beasts directive principles which only a long philosophic education and especially Christianity have rammed into restive human docility. Toussenel and Romanes are rarely superior to the possessors of a prodigious dog or miraculous cat: one must reject as apocryphal the anecdotes of animals' intelligence, and especially those boasting their sensibility, or celebrating their virtues; not that these are of necessity, inexact, but because the manner of interpreting them has vitiated, in principle, the manner of observation. One sole observer appears to me trustworthy in these matters, namely J. H. Fabre, the man who, since Réaumur has penetrated furthest into the intimacy of insects, and whose work is veritably the creator, perhaps without his having suspected it, of a general psychology of animals.

The madness of attributing to beasts the intuitive knowledge of our moral catechism has created the legend of the elephant's sexual modesty. These chaste monsters hide, they say, to make love; animated by a wholly romantic sensibility, they can not give way to their feelings save in the mystery of the jungle, in the labyrinth of the virgin forests: that is why they have never been known to breed in captivity. Nothing is more idiotic; the elephant in the public garden or the circus is ready enough to make love, although with less enthusiasm than

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in his native forest, as is the case with nearly all beasts newly captive. He breeds under man's eye with perfect indifference, and no showman can prevent the she elephant, who is very lecherous, from manifesting with full voice her shameless desires. As her vulva opens not between her legs but toward the middle of her abdomen, Buffon believed that she had to lie on her back to receive the male. This is not so, but she has to make a particular gesture: she kneels.

Whales who are by far the greatest mammals, obey a special rite, imposed by their lack of members and the element in which they live; the two colossi heave over on their sides like sprung ships, and join obliquely, belly to belly. The male organ is enormous, even in the state of rest, six or eight feet long and fifteen or sixteen inches in circumference. The vulva of the female is longitudinal; near it is found the udder which projects greatly when she gives suck. This udder has ejectory power, the whale cub hooks on by his lips, and the milk is sent to him as from a pump, marvellous accommodation of organs to the necessities of the milieu.

Anatomy forces female seals and walruses to turn over to receive the male. In the specie commonly called