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CHAPTER XII
THE MECHANISM OF LOVE
IV. Hermaphrodism.– Sexual life of oysters.Gasteropodes.– The idea of reproduction and the idea of pleasure.– Mechanism of reciprocal reproduction: helices.– Spintrian habits.– Reflections on hermaphrodism.
FISH are the only vertebrates among whom one encounters hermaphrodism, either accidental:
cyprins, herrings, scombers; or regular, sargue, sparaillon, seran. The myxines,
very humble fish living as parasites, are alternative hermaphrodites, like oysters,
like ascides; the genital gland functions first as testicle, then as ovary. The amphioxus,
the bridge between invertebrates and vertebrates, is not hermaphrodite. The most
strongly marked and most complicated forms of hermaphrodism are found in mollusks,
and chiefly in gasteropodes. The alternate hermaphrodism of oysters produces effects
which have been observed throughout antiquity. The advice to abstain from oysters
during months lacking an "r" is based on a fact, and that fact sexual.
From September to May, they are males, they are testicles, they elaborate sperm,
they are good; from June to August the ovaries bourgeon, fill with eggs which turn
whitish as they ripen, the oysters are females, they are bad; fecundation takes place
at this time, the spermatozoides, born in the pre-
1O7
ceding period, finally perform their office. Superstitions before being rejected
ought to be minutely observed and analysed, there is nearly always a kernel of truth
in the gross envelope.
In the hermaphrodism of echinoderms, of fish, there is never auto fecundation; either
the sexual products meet outside the animals, which have neither copulating organs,
nor a related genital life; it is a simple growth of germs; or, in a more complex
phase the individuals have exterior male organs, and female organs, but they can
not use them without the aid of another individual acting either as male, or as female.
Here a new distinction is imposed: either the animal will be successively male, and
then female; or it will be both at once. This union of the two sexes seems useless,
according to human logic, when the two genital glands ripen at different seasons;
one understands it better when the reciprocal fecundation is simultaneous, since
this doubles the number of females and better assures the conservation of the specie.
One must set aside the idea of pleasure. Apart from the fact that we can judge it
only by a very distant and even dubious analogy considering the difference between
the nervous systems of man and mollusk, one must set it aside as useless. Pleasure
is a result not an aim. In most animal species coition is but a prelude to death,
and often love and death work their supreme act in the same instant. Copulation of
insects is suicide: would it be reasonable to consider it as produced by a desire
to die? One must dissociate the idea of pleasure and the idea of love, if one wants
to understand anything of the tragic movements which perpetually beget life at the
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expense of life itself. Pleasure explains nothing. People might simply be commanded
to die as a means of reproduction, they would obey with the same eagerness: this
is observed even in humanity. Dithyrambs on pleasure would be misplaced apropos of
the mutual ticklings of two snails on a vine leaf; the subject is rather uncomfortable.
Note then two helices, both bisexual, fulfilling exactly the biblical phrase: "he
created them male and female"; their genital organs are very well developed;
the penis and oviduct opening into a vestibule, which in the act of copulation unbellies
itself in part, so that the penis and vagina come in touch with the orifice; mutual
intromission takes place. A third organ comes from the vestibule, without analogy
in superior animals; it is a little pocket containing a small stiletto, a jewelled
dagger; it is an excitative organ, the needle to prick up desires. These beasts who
have prepared for love by fasting, by long rubbings, by whole days of close pressure,
finally come to a decision, the swords come out of their scabbards, they conscientiously
stab each other, this causes the penis to rise from its sheath; the double mating
is accomplished.
There are species in which the position of the organs is such that the same individual
can not be at the same time the female of the one for whom he acts as male, but he
can at that moment serve as female to another male, who is female to a third, and
so on. This explains the garlands of spintrian gasteropodes which one sees realizing
innocently and according to the ineluctable wish of nature, carnal imaginations that
have been the boast of
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erotic humanity. Facing this light from animal habits, debauchery loses all character
and all its tang, because it loses all immorality. Man, who unites in himself the
aptitudes of all the animals, all their laborious instincts, all their industries,
could not escape the heritage of their sexual methods; and there is no lewdness which
has not its normal type in nature, somewhere.
Before leaving this repugnant milieu, one may still consider the leech. Hermaphrodite,
they also practice reciprocal fecundation, but the position of their organs compels
them to assume a peculiar position: the prong emerges from a pore near the mouth;
the vagina is above the anus. The copulation of these wretched animals forms, therefore,
a head to tail, the bocal sucker coinciding with the anal sucker.
Animals having both sexes, do not necessarily show sexual dimorphism. But neither
this exact likeness of individuals, nor the double function with which they are charged,
contradicts the general law which seems to wish that an individual should be due
to elements coming from two different individuals. Autofecundation is exceptional,
is very rare. Whether or no the individual possess the two genital glands, or one
of them only, it needs a male, or an individual acting as male, and a female or an
individual acting as female, to perpetuate life. Alternative hermaphrodism confirms
these propositions, be it that the same gland transforms itself totally, turn by
turn, into male principle, then into female principle; be it divided between a male
half and a female half, these two halves ripen simultaneously or successively. When
there is total or partial alternation, the male principle is ready
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first, and waits: thus the aggressivity of the male, and the passivity of the female
are visible in the most obscure manifestations of sexual life: the fundamental psychology
of an ascide does not differ from that of an insect, or from that of a mammal.
CHAPTER XIII
THE MECHANISM OF LOVE
V. Artificial fecundation.– Disjunction of the secreting apparatus from the copulating apparatus.– Spiders.– Discovery of their copulative method.– Brutality of the female.– Habits of the epeire.– The argyronete.– The tarantula.– Exceptions: the reapers.– Dragonflies (libellule).– Dragon flies (demoiselle) virgins and "jouvencelle."– Picture of their love affairs.
THE apparatus for secreting sperm and that for copulating are sometimes separated.
The female has a vagina normally situated; the male has no penis, or else it is situated
in some part of the body not in symmetry with the receiving apparatus. It is then
necessary either for the male to make an artificial penis, as one has seen in the
cephalopodes, and as in the spider, or for him to engage in complicated manþ
uvre
to dominate the female, and to engineer the conjunction of the two apparatus, as
does the dragon fly (libellule).
The method of most arachnids strangely resembles the medical practice called artificial
fecundation, although it is hardly more so than normal fecundation. In both it is
a question of putting spermatozoides in the way of encountering ovules: it matters
little whether phallus or syringe be the vehicle. The spider uses a syringe.
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For a long time people thought that the whole genital apparatus was situated in the
feelers of the male, but anatomy could find nothing there to resemble it. Savigny
thought that the introduction of the feelers into the vulva was merely an excitative
manþuvre, and that the true copulation followed. One had only observed half the act,
the second phase. The first consists in the male's gathering up the semen in his
own belly with the feelers; he then places it in the female organ. The maxillary
peripalpe or antenna, thus transformed into a penis, contains a spiral canal which
the male fills in placing it against the opening of his spermatic canals. One sees
the joint of one of the knuckles open, letting appear a white bourrelet (pad with
a hole in the middle), this is bent, and plunged into the vulva, it emerges and the
insect flees. System marvellously adapted to the circumstances, for the female is
ferocious and quite ready to devour her suitor. But is it the ferocity of the female
which has modified the fecundating system, or is it the system, so lacking in tenderness,
which has led the receptress to find only an enemy in the aspirant who advances horn
to the fore? Acts which produce constant and useful results always seem to us ordered
by an admirable logic; one need only give oneself up to a certain laziness of mind,
to be led quite gently to call them providential and to fall little by little into
the innocent nets of finalism.
Doubtless– and undeniable– there is a general finality, but one must conceive it as represented entire by the present state of nature. This will not be a conception of order, but a conception of fact, and in any case, the
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means used to attain this fact should in no way be integrated in the finality itself.
None of the procedures of generation, for example, bears the mark of necessity. It
is not the ferocity of the she spider which demands the sexual habit; the female
mantis is still more savage, and mantis' method is cavalage. It does not seem as
if anything in nature were ordered in view of some benefit; causes blindly engender
causes; some maintain life, others force it to progress, others destroy it; we qualify
them differently, according to the dictates of our sensibility, but they are non
qualifiable; they are movements, and nothing else. The pebble ricochets on the water,
or it doesn't; this has no importance in itself, nothing more will come of it and
nothing less. It is an image of supreme finality: after eight or ten bounds, life,
like the pebble thrown by a child, will fall into the abyss, and with it all the
good and evil, all facts, all ideas, and all things.
The idea of finality leads one back to the idea of fact, one is no longer tempted
to attempt an explanation of nature. One would try modestly to reconstruct the chain
of causes and, as a great number of rings will always be lacking, and as the absence
of one ring alone would suffice to unhook the whole reasoning, one will do this in
a piety tempered by scepticism.
The epirus, although a spider, is not an ill conditioned beast; she is episcopal,
she carries on her back a pretty white cross upside down. The large ones are the
females; the very small ones, the males. Both hook their webs upon bushes, on shrubs,
live without knowing each other until instinct has spoken. A day comes when the
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male is restless; the gnats fail to satisfy him; he leaves, he abandons the home
he will perhaps not see again. He is not, indeed, without misgivings, and fear is
mingled with his desire, for the mistress he seeks is an ogress. Thus he prepares
a way of retreat in case of combat; he stretches a thread from the female's web to
a neighbouring branch, road of entry, gate of exit. Often, the instant he shows himself
with his excited air, the female epirus leaps on him and eats him without formality.
Is it ferocity? No, stupidity. She also is awaiting the male, but her attention is
distraught between the coming of the caller and the coming of prey. The web has shaken,
she leaps, enlaces, devours. Perhaps a second male if he attempt the pass, will be
gladly received, the first sacrifice accomplished, perhaps this mistake, if it is
one, will wake all the amorous attention of the distracted female? Ferocity, stupidity;
there is another explanation which I will give later, apropos the mantis and the
green grasshopper: it is very probable that the sacrifice of the male, or of a male,
is absolutely necessary, and that it is a sexual rite. The little male approaches;
if he is recognized, and if his coming coincides with the genital state of the female,
she merely behaves like all the rest of her peers, and even though she be the larger
and stronger, she flees; she lets herself, full of coquetry, slide down a thread;
the male imitates the play, he descends, she mounts, he mounts, the acquaintance
is made, they feel each other, they pat each other, the male fills his pump, the
mating is accomplished. She is rapid, the male stays on guard, ready to flee at the
least movement of his adversary; often he hasn't time. Scarcely has the fecun-
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cation been finished when the ogress turns, leaping, and devours the suitor on the
very spot of his amours. They say that she does not always wait for the end of the
operation, and that preferring a good meal to a caress, she interrupts the performance
with a slap of her mandibles. When the male has the luck to escape he disappears
like a flash, goes down his thread like greased lightning. The argyronete uses manþuvre
analogous, but even more curious. It is a water spider, which goes under water in
an ingenious small diving bell, a future nest. The female having made her diving
bell, the male, not daring to present himself thinks out the wheeze of making another
bell just next that of the female. Then at a propitious moment he breaks through
the dividing wall and profits by the surprise of his sudden entry. When it is a matter
of not being eaten, all means are the right ones.
The tarantula, whose habits are far from gentle, is not cruel to her suitor. This
monster who spins no web, spins out a long idyllic courtship. Extended preludes,
puerile games, delicate caresses, lambkins' reapings. Finally the female surrenders
fully. The male places her as he wishes, chooses for her the pose most pleasing to
him, and lies obliquely against her, gently and repeatedly taking the sperm from
his abdomen he insinuates each of his palpes, one after the other in the swollen
vulva of the female. The break away is sudden, a jump. Still more tender are the
courtships of the leaping spider; they advance by little rushes, stop, watch, leap
on their prey, insect or fly, or else float at the wind's will on the end of a long
hanging web thread. When male and female meet,
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they approach, tap each other with forefeet and tentacles, separate, reapproach,
recommence. After a thousand salutations, they pose head to head, the male climbs
onto the female, stretches out until he reaches the abdomen. Then he lifts the extremity
of it, applies his palpe to the vulva, and retires. The same act is begun again several
times, the female is all compliance and offers no insult to her companion. There
are certain exceptions to the method of spiders; the reapers, little balls mounted
on immense legs, act by cavalage. The males have a retractile prong fixed by two
ligaments to the abdomen, the female an oviduct which opens in vulva and spreads
interiorly into a vast pouch, the resting place for the eggs. The male does not manage
this female, a strong objector, save by seizing her mandibles with his pincers. Overcome
by this bite she submits; the coupling lasts several seconds.
The dragon fly, gracefully called "la demoiselle," is one of the finest
insects in the world and certainly the most beautiful of those which fly in our climate;
no soft butterfly colour is a match for the moving shimmer of its supple abdomen,
and the bright head colours as of steely blue helmet. Description? It is difficult
to find two alike; one has tawny body and dove grey abdomen, spotted with yellow,
and black. feet, transparent wings with brown borders or nerve veinings, or these
in black and white; another has a yellow head, brown eyes, brown corselet veined
in green, an abdomen touched with green and yellow, irised wings; another called
"la Vierge" is gilded green, or blue with green shimmer, and spotless wings;
another "la Jouvencelle" has wings thin to in-
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visibility, is clothed in all shades, metallic blue, reddish brown green, iris violet,
tawny chrysanthemum, whatever her fundamental colour she encircles her elegant barrel
with rings of black velvet. Naturalists divide these insects into libellules, æshnes,
agrions; Fabricius disputes with Linnæus; peasants and children (for grown
ups despise nature) call them "demoiselles," "vierges" and "jouvencelles."1 Some fly very high, in the trees, others along the streams
and over pond edges; others over ferns, reeds, broom. I have passed days in the sun
watching them, waiting to see their courtships; I have seen them, and know that Réaumur
has not deceived us. It was on the surface of a pond among the border flowers, a
morning of July, a flaming morning. The "Vierge," corselet of blue green,
almost invisible wings, fluttered in great numbers, slowly, as if seriously; the
hour of parade had arrived. And everywhere couples formed, rings of azure hung from
the grass blades, trembled on leaves of the water lentil, everywhere green arrows
and blue arrows played at flight, and wing brushing, at joining. The big eyes and
strong head of the libellule give an air of gravity to the brilliancy of this spectacle.
The ejaculatory canal opens at the ninth ring of the abdomen, that is to say, at
the point; the copulating apparatus is fixed at the second ring, that is, near the
neck, and is composed of a penis, of hooks, and a reservoir: the male bending his
long belly first fills the reservoir, then empties it into the organs of the female.
For
1In America we have, so far as I know, only the
terms "dragon fly" and "darning needle," and for the larger ones
"devil's darning needle."öE. P.
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a long time he pursues the desired mistress, plays with her, finally seizes her above
the neck with the terminal pincers of his abdomen, then, turning like a serpent,
he bends forward and continues to fly, a beast with four pairs of wings. In this
attitude, the male, sure of himself, with the air of the hour's indifferent master,
chases midges, visits flowers and the axilla of plants where the midges sleep, nabs
them with his feet and puts them into his mouth. Finally the female accedes, bends
downward her flexible abdomen and makes its orifice coincide with the male's pectoral
penis: the two beastlets are but one splendid ring with a double cup, a ring trembling
with life and with fire.
No gesture of love can be conceived more charming than that of the female slowly
bending back her blue body, going half way toward her lover, who erect on his forefeet
bears, with taut muscles, the full weight of the movement. It is so pure, so immaterial,
one would say that two ideas joined in the limpidity of ineluctable thought.
CHAPTER XIV
THE MECHANISM LOVE
VI. Cannibalism in sex.– Females who devour the male, those who devour the spermatophore.– Probable use of these practices.– Fecundation by the whole male.– Loves of the white foreheaded dectic.– The green grasshopper.– The Alpine analote.– The ephippigere. – Further reflections of the cannibalism of sex.– Loves of the praying mantis.
THE spider eats her male; the mantis eats her male; in locustians, the female is
fecundated by a spermatophore, an enormous genital bunch of grapes. She gnaws through
this envelope of spermatozoides to the last shred. These two facts should be brought
together. Whether the female swallow the male entire, or only the product of his
genital glands, it is probably in both cases a complementary act of fecundation.
There are possibly in the male, assimilable elements necessary for the development
of the eggs, almost as the albumen of seeds, little aborted plants, is necessary
for nourishing the vegetable embryo, surviving plantlet. Plants, according to recent
study, are born twins: in order to live one must devour the other. Shifted to animal
life, and slightly modified, this mechanism explains what one terms, from sentimentalism,
the sexual ferocity of the she mantis and the she
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spider. Life is made out of life. Nothing lives save at the expense of life. The
male insect nearly always dies immediately after the mating; in locustians he is
literally emptied by the genital effort: whether the female respect, or devour him,
his life would hardly be longer, or shorter thereby. He is sacrificed; why, if this
is for the good of the species should he not be eaten? Anyhow, he is eaten. It is
his destiny, and he feels it coming, at least the male spider does, and the male
mantis allows himself to be gnawed with a perfect stoicism. The spider jibs, the
other submits. It is really a matter of ritual, not of accident or of crime. One
might try experiments. One might prevent the female dectic from pecking the mistletoe
berry which the male has discharged on her; one might watch the coupling of mantes
and isolate them immediately: and then follow all the phases from laying to hatching.
If the spermatophagy of the dectic is useless, if the murder of the male mantis is
useless, it will annul the foregoing reflections, and others will rise.
The white fronted dectic is, like all the locustians (grasshoppers), a very ancient
insect; it existed in the coal era, and it is perhaps this antiquity which explains
its peculiar fecundative method. As the cephalopodes, his contemporaries, he has
recourse to the spermatophore; yet there is mating, there is embracing; there are
even play and caresses. Here are the couple face to face, they caress each other
with long antennæ "fine as hair," as Fabre says; after a moment they
separate. The next day, new encounter, new blandishments. Another day, and Fabre
finds the male knocked down by the female,
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who overwhelms him with her embrace; he gnaws her belly. The male disentangles himself
and escapes, but a new assault masters him, he lies flat on his back. This time the
female, lifted on her high legs, holds him belly to belly; she bends back the extremity
of her abdomen; the victim does likewise; there is junction, and soon one sees something
enormous issue from the convulsive flanks of the male, as if the animal were pushing
out its entrails. "It is," continues the best observer (Fabre, Souvenirs
VI), "an opaline leather bottle about the size and colour of a mistletoe berry,"
a bottle with four pockets at least, held together by feeble sutures. The female
receives this leather bottle, or spermatophore, and carries it off glued to her belly.
Having got over the thunder clap, the male gets up, makes his toilet; the female
browses as she walks. "From time to time she rises on her stilts, bends into
a ring, seizes her opaline bundle in her mandibles, and chews it gently." She
breaks off little pieces, chews them carefully, and swallows them. Thus while the
fecundative particles are extravasated toward the eggs which they are to animate,
the female devours the spermatic pouch. After having tasted it piece by piece she
suddenly pulls it off, kneads it, swallows it whole. Not a scrap is lost; the place
is clear, and the oviscapte is cleaned, washed, polished. The male has begun to sing
again, during this meal, but it is not a love song, he is about to die; he dies:
passing near him at this moment, the female looks at him, smells him, takes a bite
of his thigh.
Fabre was unable to see the mating of the green grass hopper, which takes place at
night, but he observed the long preludes; he has seen the slow play of soft anten-
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næ. The result of the coupling is the same as with all locustians; the female
chews and swallows the genital ampulla. She is a terrible beast of prey who eats
alive a huge cicada, who fearlessly sucks the entrails of a wriggling cockchafer.
One can't say whether she eats her male, dead or alive; it is very probable for he
is quite timid. Another dectic, the Alpine analote, has given Fabre the alarming
spectacle: a male on his back, a female on his belly, the genital organs joining
end to end in this single contact, and while she was receiving the fecundative caress,
the enigmatic female, with the fore part of her body raised, was gnawing with little
mouthfuls, another male held in her claws, impassive, his belly chewed open. The
male analote is much smaller and weaker than the female; like his confrere the spider,
he flees with greatest possible speed after the end of coition; he is very often
nipped. In the case observed by Fabre, the meal was doubtless the end of a preceding
amour: these locustians have the habit, rare among insects, of receiving several
suitors. Truly this cannibal Marguerite de Bourgogne is a fine type of beast, and
gives a fine spectacle, not of immorality, an empty term, but of the serenity of
nature, which permits all things, wills all things, and for whom there are neither
vices nor virtues, but only movements and chemic reactions.
The spermatophore of the ephippiger is enormous, nearly half the size of the animal.
The nuptial feast is finished according to the same rite, and the female, having
finished the leather bottle spermatophore, adds thereto the poor emptied male. She
does not even wait until he is dead; she chops him up, as he is dying, limb by limb:
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having fecundated her with all his blood, he must feed her with all his flesh.
This male flesh is doubtless powerful comforting to the mother to be. Female mammifers,
after delivery, devour the placenta. One has given different interpretations to this
habitual act. Some see a precaution against enemies: it is necessary to obliterate
traces of a condition which clearly shows that one is feeble, defenceless, surrounded
by young, a tasty prey at the mercy of any tooth; others say it is a recuperation
of energy. This latter opinion seems more likely, especially if one consider the
habits of locustians. The spermatophore is indeed the preceding analogy to the placenta.
On the other hand, fecundation, before being a specific act, belongs to the general
phenomena of nutrition: it is the integration of one force in another force, and
nothing more. The devouring of the male, partial or complete, represents, then, only
the most primitive form of the union of cellules, this junction of two unities in
one, which precedes the segmentation, feeds it, makes it possible during a limited
time, after which a new conjunction is necessary. If the actual acts are only a survival,
if they have lasted after their utility has disappeared, it is another question,
and one which I leave again to experimenters. It will be enough for me if I have
gained acceptance of the general principle that animals' acts, whatever they may
be, can not be understood unless one strip them of the sentimental qualifications
beneath which ignorant humanity has covered them, corrupting them with providential
finalism.
While fully recognizing the immense social value of prejudices, analysis should be
permitted to excoriate
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them and to grind them. Nothing appears more clear than maternal love, and nothing
is more widespread throughout all nature: yet nothing gives a falser interpretation
of the acts which these two words pretend to explain. One makes a virtue of it, that
is to say, in the Christian sense, a voluntary act; one seems to think that it depends
on the mother to love or not to love her children, and one considers culpable those
who relax or forget their motherly cares. Like generation, motherly love is a commandment;
it is the second condition of the perpetuity of life. Mothers sometimes are without
it; some mothers also are sterile: the will intervenes neither in one case nor in
the other. As the rest of nature, as ourselves, animals live submitted to necessity,
they do what they ought to do, so far as their organs permit them. The mantis who
eats her husband is an excellent egg layer who prepares, passionately, the future
of her progeny.
After Fabre's observations of couples of these insects caged, the female much stronger
than the male mantes, are the predatory ones, who do combat for love. The combats
are deadly, the vanquished female is eaten at once. The male is bashful. At the moment
of desire he limits himself to posing, to making sheep's eyes, which the female seems
to consider with indifference or disdain. Tired of parade, he finally decides, and
with spread wings, leaps trembling upon the back of the ogress. The mating lasts
five or six hours; when the knot is loosed, the suitor is, regularly, eaten. The
terrible female is polyandrous. Other insects refuse the male when their ovaries
have been fecundated, the mantis accepts two, three, four, up to seven; and Bluebeard,
eats them regularly after the
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act is accomplished. Fabre has seen better. The mantis is almost the only insect
with a neck; the head does not join the thorax immediately, the neck is long and
flexible, bending in all directions. Thus, while the male is enlacing and fecundating
her, the female will turn her head back and calmly eat her companion in pleasure.
Here is one headless, another is gone up to the corsage, and his remains still clutch
the female who is thus devouring him at both ends, getting from her spouse simultaneously
the pleasures ac mensa ac thoro, both bed and board from her husband. The double
pleasure only ends when the cannibal reaches the belly: the male then falls in shreds
and the female finishes him on the ground. Poiret has witnessed a scene perhaps even
more extraordinary. A male leaps on a female and is going to couple. The female turns
her head, stares at the intruder, and decapitates him with a blow of her jaw foot,
a marvellous toothed scythe. Without disconcertion the male, wedges up, spreads himself,
makes love as if nothing abnormal had happened. The mating took place, and the female
had the patience to wait for the end of the operation before finishing her wedding
breakfast.
The headless nuptials are explained by the fact that the insects' brain does not
seem to have unique control of its movements; these animals can live without the
cervical ganglion. A headless grasshopper will still lift his bruised foot to his
mouth, after three hours, with the movement familiar to him in his complete condition.
The small mantis, or colourless mantis, is almost as fierce as her great sister,
the religious mantis; but the empuse, a kindred specie, seems peaceful
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CHAPTER XV
THE SEXUAL PARADE
Universality of the caress, of amorous preludes.– Their role in fecundation.– Sexual games of birds.– How cantharides caress.– Males' combats.– Pretended combats of birds.– Dance of the tetras.– Gardener bird.– His country house.– His taste for flowers.– Reflections on the origin of his art.– Combats of crickets.– Parade of butterflies.– Sexual sense of orientation.– The great peacock moth.– Animals' submission to orders of Nature.– Transmutation of physical values.– Rutting calendar.
ONE has convinced oneself in the preceding chapters that the games of love, preludes,
caresses, combats are in no way peculiar to the human race. On nearly all rungs of
the animal ladder, or rather on all the branches of the animal fan, the male is the
same, the female is the same. It is always the equation given in the intimate mechanism
of union of animalcule and ovule: a fortress toward which amans volat currit ac lþ
tatur.
The whole passage of the Imitatio (L. III, chap. iv, 4) is a marvellous psychological
presentation of love in nature, of sexual attraction as it is felt throughout the
whole series of creatures. The besieger must enter the fortress; he uses violence,
sometimes gentle violence; more often trickery, the caress.
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Caress, charming movements, grace, tenderness, we do all these things of necessity,
not because we are men, but because we are animals. Their aim is to liven the sensibilities,
to dispose the organism to accomplish with joy its supreme function. They are, very
probably, agreeable to the individual and they are perceived as pleasure only because
they are useful to the species. This character of necessity is naturally more apparent
in animals than in man. In animals the caress has fixed forms, of which the kiss,
however, gives a good example; the caress is an integral part of the cavalage. A
prelude, but a prelude which can not be omitted without compromising the essential
part of the drama. It happens, however, that man, able to overexcite himself cerebrally,
may abridge, or even neglect the prologue to coition: this is also noted in certain
domestic mammifers, the bull and stallion. The mere sight or smell of the other sex
is doubtless enough to produce a state permitting immediate union. This is not the
case with dogs, who are still more domestic, the two sexes give themselves up to
play, to explorations, they demand each other's consent, courtship continues, sometimes
the male, despite his condition, retreats; more often the female lowers the draw
bridge of her tail, and closes the fortress. One knows the provocations of birds.
M. Mantegazza has agreeably recounted the sexual play of two vultures, the female
shut in the carcass of an almost devoured horse, interrupted her pecking of carrion,
to groan deeply, turning her head to look up into the air. A male vulture soared
above the larder, replying to the groans of the female. However, when the overexcited
male descended toward the supposedly willing vulturess,
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she retreated into the carcass, and after a short dispute she made him understand
that the time was not yet ripe, and sent him off. After which the groans recommenced;
the female seemed annoyed; she mounted the cage of bone, swelling her wings, lifting
her tail, cooing. The union finally took place in a great commotion of ruffled feathers
and shaken bones.
The same author has precisely noted the complicated preludes indulged in by two sparrows.
I give the resume, graphically: A troop of sparrows on the roof in the morning; calm,
they make their toilet. Arrives a large male who emits a violent cry; one of the
females replies at once, not by a cry but by an act: she leaves the group. The male
joins her, she flies to a neighbouring roof; there follows a long chatter beak to
beak. New flight; the male rests in the sun, then rejoins the minx. The assaults
begin, the male is repulsed. The female moves off, in little hops. The edge of the
roof stops the flight, she profits by this excuse and surrenders.
But it is the prodigious insect whom one must interrogate. One knows the cantharides,
these beautiful coleoptera on whom pharmacy has inflicted so wicked a reputation.
The female gnaws her oak leaf, the male arrives, mounts her back, enlaces her with
his hind feet. Then with his stretched abdomen he flagellates the female alternately
to right and left with frantic speed. At the same time he massages her, lashes her
neck furiously with his front feet, all his body shakes and vibrates. The female
remains passive, awaiting the calm. It comes. Without letting go the male stretches
out his forelegs in a cross, unbends a little, wagging from head and corselet. The
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female starts eating again. The calm is short; the male's follies recommence. Then
there is another manþuvre, with the fold of his legs and tarses, he seizes the female's
antennæ, forces her to lift her head, at the same time redoubling the lashing
of her flanks. New pose; new start of the flagellation: finally the female opens.
The coupling lasts a day and a night, after which the male falls, but remains knotted
to the female who drags him from leaf to leaf, the penis attached to her organs.
Sometimes he also takes a mouthful here and there; when he drops off it is to die.
The female lays the eggs and dies in her turn. The cerocome, an insect kin to the
cantharide, has analogous habits, but the female is even colder, and the male is
obliged to tap more than one before getting an answer. In vain he beats the sides
of his chosen companion with his paws, she remains insensible, inert. This action,
moreover, has the full appearance of having passed to a state of mania in the male
muscles, so much so that, in default of females, males mount and pummel each other.
As soon as a male is charged by another male he takes the female attitude and remains
quiet; one sees pyramids of three or four males; in which case the top one is the
only one wildly waving his feet; the others remain immobile, as if their position
of mounts transformed them into passive animals: probably because their muscles are
pinned down. (For these two observations see Fabre, "Souvenirs," vol. II.
Cérocomes, mylabres et zonitis.)
It is rare for a female to assist the male in his work, but there remains the obstacle
of the other males. Contrary to what one might think, there is no relation be-
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tween the male's social character and his amorous character. Ferocious animals show
themselves at the moment of love making much more placid than gentle or even timid
animals. The scary rabbit is an impetuous, tyrannous and jealous lover. If the female
does not accede to his first desire, he rages. She is, moreover, very lascivious
and gestation in no way interrupts her amours. The hare, who does not pass for audacious,
is an ardent and heady lover; he fights furiously with his peers for the possession
of a female. They are animals very well equipped for love, the penis greatly developed,
clitoris almost as large. The males make real voyages, run for entire nights in search
of the doe hare who is sedentary: like the doe rabbit, she never refuses, even when
pregnant.
Martins, polecats, sables, rats fight violently during the rutting season. Rats accompany
their fights with sharp cries. Stags and wildboars, and a great number of other species
fight to the death for the possession of females; a practice not unknown to humanity.
Even heavy tortoises feel exasperation from love; the defeated male is tilted onto
his back.
Finer, destined perhaps for a superior and charming civilization, the birds like
combat; sometimes the duel is serious, as in gallinaceæ, cock fights, often
it is a courtesy, a mimicry. The female of the rock cock of Brazil is tawny and without
beauty, the male is yellow orange, with crest bordered in deep red, the long wing
feathers and tail feathers are red brown. One sees the females ranged in a circle
as a crowd about jugglers, the males are strutting, cutting capers, moving their
colour shot
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feathers, getting themselves admired and desired. From time to time a female admits
that she is moved, a couple is formed. But the tetras, heather cocks of North America,
have still more curious customs. Their fights have become exactly what they have
with us, that is, dances. It is no longer the tourney, it is the tour de valse. What
completes the proof that these parades are a survival, a transformation, is that
the males, being amused by them, perform them not only before but after coupling.
They even practice them for diversion while the females are sitting on the eggs,
absorbed in maternal duty. Travellers thus describe the tetras' dance (Milton and
Cheaddle, "Atlantic to Pacific," p. 171 of the French translation): "They
gather, twenty or thirty in a chosen place, and begin to dance like mad. Opening
their wings, they draw together their feet, like men doing the danse du sac. Then
they advance toward each other, do a waltz turn, pass to a second partner, and so
on. This contre danse of prairie chickens is very amusing. They become so absorbed
in it that one can approach quite near."
Birds of Australia and New Guinea1 make love with
a charming ceremony. To attract his mistress the male makes a veritable country house,
or, if he is less skilful, a rustic bower of greenery. He plants rushes, green sprigs,
for he is small, about the size of a blackbird; he bends them into a vault, often
a metre long. He strews the floor with leaves, flowers, red fruits, white
1One has the unpronounceable name, savants designating
it by the jumble of letters: Ptilinorhynches. The other is called the "gardener."
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bits of bone, bright pebbles, bits of metal, jewels stolen in the neighbourhood.
They say that when Australians miss a ring or a pair of scissors, they search these
green tents. Our magpie shows a certain taste for bright objects: people tell tales
about him. The "gardenerbird" of New Guinea is still more ingenious, to
such a degree that his work is mistaken for human work and people are deceived thereby.
With his beak and claws he manages as well and better than peasants, often showing
a decorative taste which they lack. People search for the "origin of art":
there you have it, in the sexual game of a bird. Our æsthetic manifestations
are but a development of this same instinct to please which, in one specie over excites
the male, in another moves the female. If there is a surplus it will be spent aimlessly,
for pure pleasure: that is human art; its origin is that of the art of birds and
insects.
The Grande Encyclopédie has given a picture of the gardener bird's pleasure
house. He is called in most scholarly parlance the Amblyornis inornata, because he
is lacking in personal beauty. One would take his house for the work of some intelligent
delicate pygmy. We find the description of it, after the Italian traveller M. O.
Beccari1 "In crossing a magnificent forest
M. Beccari found himself suddenly in the presence of a little conical cabin, in front
of which was a lawn strewn with flowers; he at once recognized the sort of hut which
M. Bruijn's huntsmen had described to him as the work of a dark
1The title of his study is curious "Les Cabanes
et les jardins de l'Amblyornis." (Annales du Musée d'histoire naturelle
de
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bird somewhat larger than a blackbird. He made a very exact sketch of it, and verifying
the native's tales by his own observation, he found out how the bird makes this building
which is not so much a nest a pleasure house. The amblyornis chooses a little clearing
with unbroken lawn and a small tree in the middle. Around this tree or bush which
serves as axis, the bird places a little moss, then he plants slantwise the branches
of a plant which will continue to grow for some time; juxtaposition of branches form
the inclined walls of the hut. On one side they are left open to make a doorway,
before which is the garden whose elements are gathered with difficulty, tuft by tuft,
at some distance. After having carefully cleaned the lawn, the amblyornis sows it
with flowers and fruits which he collects in the neighbourhood, and which he renews
from time to time." This primitive gardener belongs to the bird of paradise
family, remarkable for the beauty of their plumage. It seems that not being able
to dress himself, he has exteriorized his instinct. According to travellers, these
cabins are true houses of rendezvous, the country boxes of the seventeenth century,
the "follies" of the XVIIIth. The gallant bird ornaments it with everything
that might please the invited female; if she is satisfied, it is the abode of love,
after having been that of declarations. I do not know whether these oddities have
been given the importance which they should have been, in the history of birds and
of humanity. The scholar, the only person knowing such details, usually fails utterly
to understand them. One savant whom I read, thinks of the thieving magpie, and adds,
these traits which are common
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to them ally them closely to birds of paradise and corvida. Doubtless, but that is
not very important. The grave fact is the gathering of the first flower. The useful
fact explains animality; the useless fact explains man. Now, it is of capital importance
to show that the useless fact is not peculiar to man alone.
Crickets also have courting fights, but perhaps for a different reason: the feebleness
of their offensive weapons, and the solidity of their armour. There is, however,
a winner and loser. The loser decamps, the conqueror sings. Then he shines himself,
stamps, seems nervous. Fabre says that emotion often renders him mute; his elytra
(wing shells) shake without giving a sound. The female cricket, witness of the duel,
runs to hide under a leaf as soon as it is over. "She draws back the curtain
a little, and looks out, and wants to be seen." After this play, she shows herself
completely, the cricket rushes forward, makes a half turn, rears up and slides under
her belly. The work finished, he gets away as fast as possible, for we are before
an enigmatic orthopter, the female is quite ready to eat him. It is the male's song
which attracts the female cricket. When she hears it, she listens, takes her bearings,
obeys the call. It is the same with cicadas, even though the two sexes usually live
side by side. By imitating the sound of the male, one can deceive the females and
make them come to one.
Sometimes sight, sometimes smell guides the male. Many hymenoptera, furnished with
a powerful visual organ keep watch for the females, spying the vicinity. Thus also
many day butterflies. When the male notices
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a female, he pursues, but in order to get in front of her, to be seen, and he seems
to tempt her with slow waving of his wings. This display lasts often quite a long
time. Finally their antennæ touch, their wings stroke each other, and they
fly off in company. The coupling often takes place in the air; thus among pierides.
In certain species, bombyx for example, the females are heavy and even aptera, the
male who is in contrast lively, fecundates several, going from one to the other,
which is doubtless what gives butterflies their reputation for inconstancy. They
live too short a time to deserve it: many born in the morning do not see the next
day's sun. One might rather make them a symbol for pure thought. There are some who
do not eat, and among those who do not eat there are some whom nature has vowed to
virginity. Hermaphrodites of a singular sort, male on the right side, female on the
left, they seem to be two sexual halves welded together along the medial line. The
organs whose centre is cut by this line are but demi organs good for nothing save
the entertainment of observers. Hybrid butterflies, produced by crossing of two species,
are not very rare; they also are incapable of reproduction.
The coupling of day butterflies lasts only a few minutes, among night butterflies
it is often prolonged for a day and a night, as in sphinx, phalenes, noctuelles.
If it is a reward, it is due to their long courageous voyages in quest of the female
whom they have divined. The great peacock moth covers several leagues of country
in the attempt to satisfy his desire. Blanchard tells of a naturalist who having
caught a female bombyx and put her in his pocket, returned home escorted by a cloud
of over
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two hundred males. In spring, in a place where the great peacock is so rare that
one with difficulty finds one or two per year, the presence of a caged female will
draw a hundred males, as Fabre has shown by experiment. These feverish males are
endowed with very brief ardour. Whether or no they have touched a female, they live
but two or three days. Enormous insects, larger than a humming bird, they do not
eat; their bocal pieces are merely an ornament, a decor: they are born to reproduce
and to die. The males seem infinitely more numerous than the females, and it is probable
that not more than one in an hundred can accomplish his destiny. He who misses the
pursued female, who arrives too late, is lost: his life is so short that it would
be very difficult for him to discover a second. It is true that in normal circumstances
the female should stop emitting her sexual odour as soon as she has been ridden;
the males are thus attracted by the same female through a proportionately shorter
time and there is this much less chance of their searches being unfruitful. Is it
their sense of smell alone that guides them?
At 8 a. m. at Fabre's place in Serignan, one saw the cocoon of a lesser peacock moth
open; a female emerged and was immediately imprisoned in a wire cage. At noon a male
arrived, the first that Fabre, who had lived there all his life, had ever seen. The
wind was blowing from the north. The male came from the north, that is to say, against
the scent. At two o'clock ten had arrived. Having come as far as the house without
hesitation, they were troubled, got the wrong window, wandered from room to room,
never went directly toward the female.
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One would say that at this point they should have used another sense, perhaps sight,
despite their being crepuscular creatures, or that the cage bothered them. Perhaps
also it is the custom for the female come and play before them? It is, in any case,
evident that sense of smell plays an important rôle; the mystery would not
be less great if one supposed the bringing into play of a special sense, that of
sexual orientation. Fabre has obtained equal success with the female of a very rare
butterfly, the oak bombyx, or banded minime: in one morning sixty males arrived,
turning about the prisoner. One has observed analogous if not identical things in
certain serpents, in mammifera: everyone has seen dogs in the country, drawn by a
female in heat, coming from a considerable distance, nearly a league, without one's
being able to say how their organism had got the news.
Explanations are vain in these matters. They divert the curiosity without satisfying
the reason. What one sees clearly is a necessity: the act must be accomplished, to
this end, all obstacles, whatever they are, will be overcome. Neither distance, nor
the difficulty of the voyage, nor the danger of the approach can drive back the instinct.
In man, who has sometimes the power to escape the sexual commandments, disobedience
may have happy results. Chastity, as a transmuter, may change unused sexual energy
into intellectual or social energy; in animals this transmutation of physical values
is impossible. The compass needle remains in one immutable position, obedience is
unescapable. That is why there is so deep a rumble in nature when the spring orders
are posted. Vegetable flowers are not the only ones to open:
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sexes of flesh also flower. Birds, fish take on new and more vivid colours. There
are songs, plays, pilgrimages. Salmon who live quietly at the river mouths, must
gather, depart, climb the streams, pass weirs, scrabble against rocks which form
the dams and cataracts, wear themselves out leaping as arrows against all human and
natural obstacles. Males and females arrive worn out at the end of their journey,
the frayère of fine sand where they are to lay their eggs, and the males heroically
to spend the milt distilled from their blood.
Spring is not the only rutting season. Love's calendar covers the year. In winter,
wolves and foxes; in spring, the birds and fish; in summer, insects and many mammals;
in autumn the deer. Winter is often the season chosen by polar animals; the sable
couples in January; the ermine in March; the glutton, at the beginning and end of
winter. Domestic animals have often several seasons; for the dog, cat and house birds,
spring and autumn. One finds young otters at any time. Most insects die after mating;
but not all hemiptera, nor the queen bee, nor certain coleoptera, nor certain flies.
The stag and the stallion empty themselves, but not the ram, nor the bull nor the
he goat. The duration of pregnancy in placentaires seems to have some relation to
the size of the animal; mare, eleven to twelve months; ass, twelve months and a half;
cow, doe, nine months; sheep, goat, wolf, vixen, five months; sow, four months; bitch,
two months; cat, six weeks; rabbit, one month.
There are oddities: fecundated in August, the roe is not delivered until seven and
a half months later, the embryo remaining a long time stationary, and waiting for
the
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spring to start again. In a she bat ovulation does not take place until the end of
winter, although she has received the male in the autumn: females caught during hibernation
have the vagina swollen with inert sperm which does not act until the spring waking.
CHAPTER XVI
POLYGAMY
Rarity of monogamy.– Taste for change in animals.– Roles of monogamy and polygamy in the stability or instability of specific types.– Strife of the couple against polygamy.– Couples among insects.– Among fish, batrachians, saunans.– Monogamy of pigeons, of nightingales.– Monogamy in carnivora, in rodents.– Habits of the rabbit.– The ichneumon.– Unknown causes of polygamy.– Rarity and superabundance of males.– Polygamy in insects.– In fish.– In gallinaceæ, in web footed birds.– In herbivora.– The antelope's harem.– Human polygamy.– How it tempers the couple among civilized races.
THERE are no monogamous animals save those which love only once during their lifetime.
Exceptions to this rule have not sufficient constancy to be erected into a counter
rule. There are monogamists in fact, there are none of necessity, from the time an
animal lives long enough to commit the reproductive act several times. Free female
mammals nearly always flee the male who has once served them, they need a new one.
A bitch does not receive last season's dog save in direst extremity. This appears
to me to be the struggle of the specie against variety. The couple is the maker of
varieties. Polygamy
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drags them back to the general type of the specie. Individuals of a specie frankly
polygamous should present a very great similarity; if the species incline toward
a certain monogamy, the dissemblances become more numerous. It is not an illusion
which makes us recognize in human races almost monogamous, a lesser uniformity of
type than in polygamous societies or those given over to promiscuity, or among animal
species. The example of the dog seems the worst that one could have chosen. It isn't,
it is the best, considering that in receiving successively individuals of different
variety, the bitch tends to produce individuals not of a specialized breed, but on
the contrary of a type where several breeds will be mixed, individuals which in crossing
and recrossing in their turn, will end, if the dogs live in a free state, in forming
one single specie. Sexual liberty tends to establish uniformity of type, monogamy
strives against this tendency and maintains diversity.1
Another consequence of this manner of seeing is that one must consider monogamy as
favourable to intellectual development, intelligence being a differentiation which
accomplishes itself more often, in proportion as there are individuals and groups
who differ physically. Physical uniformity engenders uniformity of sensibility, thence
of intelligence; this does not need to be explained; now intelligences count, and
mark only their differences; uniform, they are as if they were not; impotent to hook
themselves one onto the other, to react against each other, lacking asper-
1That is to say in the eye of some imaginary divinity
who might be supposed to regard humanity, or even the slower mammals from a timeless
or say five century altitude.öTranslators note.
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ities, lacking contrary currents. This is the flock, in which each member makes the
same gesture of flight, of biting, or of roaring.
Neither the conditions of absolute monogamy, nor those of absolute promiscuity seem
to be found at present in humanity, nor among animals; but one sees the couple, in
several animal and human species, either in state of tendency, or in state of habit.
More often, especially among insects, the father, even if he survives it a little
while, remains indifferent, to the consequences of the genital act. At other times,
the fights between males so reduce their number that a sole male remains the master
and servant of a great number of females. So one must distinguish between true, and
successive polygamy; between the monogamy of one season, and that of an entire lifetime;
and finally one must set apart those animals who make love only once, or during one
season which is followed by death. These different varieties and nuances demand methodic
classification. It would be a long work, and would perhaps not attain true exactitude,
for in animals, as in man, one must count with caprice in sexual matters: when a
faithful dove is tired of her lover, she takes flight, and soon forms a new couple
with an adulterous male. The couple is natural, but the permanent couple is not.
Man has never bent to it, save with difficulty, even though it be one of the principal
conditions of his superiority.
The breasts of the male do not seem to prove the primordiality of the couple in mammals.
Although there are veridic examples of the male's having given suck, it is difficult
to consider the male udder as destined for
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a real rôle, or for an emergency milking.1
This replacement has been too rarely observed for one to use it as a basis of argument.
Embryology gives a good explanation of the existence of this useless organ. An useless
instrument is, moreover, quite as frequent in nature as the absence of a useful instrument.
Perfect concordance of organ and act is rare. In the case of insects who live but
for one love season, sometimes for two real seasons if they can benumb themselves
for the winter, polygamy is nearly always the consequence of the rarity of males,
or the superabundance of females. Space is too vast, their food too abundant for
there to be truly deadly combats between males. Moreover, their love accomplished,
the minuscule folk ask only to die, the couple is formed only for the actual time
of fecundation, the two animals at once resume their liberty, that is for the female
to deliver her eggs, and for the male to languish, and sometimes to cast a final
song to the winds. There are exceptions to this rule, but if one looks upon the exceptions
with the same gaze as on the rule, one would see in nature only what one sees on
the surface of a river, vague movements and passing shadows. To conceive some reality,
one must conceive a rule, first, as an instrument of vision and of measure. With
most insects the male does nothing but live; he deposits his seed in the female receptacle,
flies on, vanishes. He does not share any of the labours preparatory to laying. Alone
the female sphex engages
1One believes nevertheless that the male bat suckles
one of the two young that the couple regularly produces. But these animals are so
odd and so heteroclite that this example, if it is authentic, would not be a decisive
argument.
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in her terrible and clever strife with the cricket, whom she paralyzes with three
stabs of her dagger in his three moto nervous centres; alone she hollows the oblique
burrow at the bottom of which live her larvæ; alone she adorns it, fills it
with provisions, closes it. Alone the female cerceris heaps up in the deep gallery
the stunned weevils and burn cows, fruit of her excavations, larder for her progeny.
Alone the she osmie, she wasp, she philantheöone would have to cite nearly all the
hymenoptera. One understands better, when the insect deposits her eggs by chance,
without prefatory manþ
uvres, or by special instruments, that the male co operation
is lacking; only the female cicada can sink her clever burrow in the olive bark.
There are however couples among insects. Among coleoptera there are the "purse
maker," the necrophore. Stercorian geotrupes, lunar copris, onitis bison, sisyphus,
work soberly side by side preparing the larder for their coming families. In these
cases, the male seems master, he directs the manþ
uvres in the complicated operations
of the necrophores. A couple get busy about a corpse, say of a field mouse; nearly
always one or two isolated males join them, the troop is organized, one sees the
chief engineer explore the territory and give orders. The female awaits them, motionless,
ready to obey, to follow the movement. As soon as there is a couple the male necrophore
commands. The male assists the female during the work of arranging the cell and the
laying. Most purse makers, sisyphus or copris make and transport together the pill
which serves as food for the larvæ; their couple is just like that of birds.
One might be-
145
lieve that in this case monogamy is necessitated by the nature of the work; not at
all: the male in other quite closely related species, sacred scarab, for example,
leaves the female alone to build the excremental ball in which she encloses her eggs.
Coming up to vertebrate one finds also certain examples of a sort of monogamy: when
the male fish serves as hatcher for his own eggs, either carrying them in a special
pouch, or heroicly sheltering them in his mouth. This is rare, since, usually, the
two sexes of fish do not approach each other, do not even know each other. Batrachians,
on the contrary, are monogamous; the female does not lay save under male pressure,
and it is so slow an operation, preceded by such long manþ
uvres that the whole season
is filled with it. The male of the common land toad rolls the long chaplet of eggs
about his feet as soon as it is divided, and goes in the evening to place it in the
neighbouring pool. Nearly all saurians seem also to be monogamous. The he and she
lizard form a couple said to last several years. Their amours are ardent, they clasp
each other closely belly to belly.
Birds are generally considered monogamous, save gallinaceæ and web footed birds;
but exceptions appear so numerous that one would have to name the species one by
one. The fidelity of pigeons is legendary, and is perhaps only a legend. The mate
pigeon certainly has tendencies to infidelity and even to polygamy, He deceives his
companion; he goes so far as to inflict upon her the shame of having a concubine
under the conjugal roof! And these two spouses, he tyrannizes over them, he enslaves
them by beating. The female, it is true,
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is not always of an easy disposition. She has her caprices. Sometimes, refusing her
mate, she deserts him and gives herself to the first comer. One will not find here
any of the zoological anecdotes on the industry of birds, their union in devotion
to the specie. The habits of these new comers in the world, are very unstable; yet
among certain gallinaceæ, monogamous for exception, like the partridge, the
males seem pulled by contrary desires, they undergo the couple rather than choose
it, and their share in the rearing of young is often very slight. One has seen the
male red partridge, after mating, abandon his female and rejoin a troop of male vagabonds.
The nightingales, perfect pair, sit on the eggs turn by turn. The male, when the
female comes to relieve him, remains near by and sings until she is comfortably settled
on the eggs. Still more devoted is the male talegalle, a sort of Australian turkey.
He makes the nest, an enormous heap of dead leaves; when the female has laid, he
watches the eggs, comes from time to time to uncover them for exposure to the sun.
He takes his share of watching the young, sheltering them under leaves until they
are able to fly.
Of mammals, the carnivora and rodents often practice a certain, at least temporary,
monogamy. Foxes live in couples, and educate the young foxes. One finds their real
habits in the old "Roman du Renart": Renard the fox goes vagabond, hunting
for prey and windfalls, while Madame Hermaline, his wife, waits at home, in her bower
at Maupertuis. The vixen teaches her children the art of killing and dividing; their
apprenticeship is made on the still living game which the male
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purveyor has brought to the house. The rabbit is very rough in love; the hamster,
another rodent, often becomes carnivorous during the rutting season; they say that
he is quite ready to eat his young, and that the female, fearing his ferocity, leaves
him before delivery. These aberrations are exaggerated in captivity, and affect even
the female. One knows that the she rabbit sometimes eats her young; this happens
especially when one has the imprudence to touch or even to look too closely at the
young rabbits. This is enough to bring on a violent disturbance of maternal sentiment.
The same dementia has been observed in a vixen who had kittened in a cage; one day
someone passed, and looked steadily at the young foxes, a quarter of an hour later
they were throttled.
Various explanations are given for this practice among she rabbits, the simplest
being that they are driven by thirst to kill the young in order to drink the blood.
This is rather Dantesque for she rabbits. They say also, regarding both wild and
tame rabbits, that the female when surprised kills the young because she has not
industry like the doe hare, cat, or bitch, to transport them to some other place
or to save at least one, by the scruff of its neck. The third explanation is that,
devouring the afterbirth, like nearly all mammals, and this from physiological motive,
the doe rabbit acquires a taste, and continues the meal, absorbing the young as well.
Without rejecting any of these explanations one may present several others. First,
it is not only the females who eat the young, the males are equally given to it.
Being very lascivious, the male rabbit tries to
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get rid of his young, in order to stop suckling, and have his female again. On the
other hand, it is a regular fact, that as soon as she has retaken the habit of having
the male, the mother rabbit, even if she is still giving suck, at once ceases to
recognize her offspring, her brief ideas already turned toward her new, coming family.
Different causes may engender identical acts, and different lines of reasoning bring
the same conclusions. There is reasoning in this case of the rabbit; there is no
reasoning save in case of initial error, when there is trouble in the intellect.
This trouble and the final massacre is all that one can state definitely: the reasoning
escapes our analysis.
Is the rabbit really monogamous? Perhaps, with a monogamy for the season, or from
necessity. The male, in any case pays no attention to the young, unless it be to
throttle them; thus the female as soon as she is gravid, takes refuge in an isolated
burrow. Their coupling, which occurs especially toward evening, is repeated as often
as five or six times an hour, the female crouching in a particular manner; the break
away is very sudden, the male throwing himself back, sidewise and uttering a short
cry. What really makes one doubt the monogamy of the rabbit is that one male is enough
for eight or ten females, that he is a great runner, that the males have murderous
fights among themselves. Doubtless one must take each specie separately. Buffon pretends
that in a warren the oldest buck rabbits have authority over the young. An observer
of rabbit habits, M. Mariot Didieux, admits this trait of superior
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sociability in angoras, which is just the specie Buffon had studied.
Buck rabbits have still other aberrations, hunters pretend that they pursue doe hares,
tire them and wear them out by their lustiness; it is certain that these couplings
give no result.
The Egyptian ichneumon lives in families. It seems that it is very interesting to
see them on a hunting expedition, first the male, then the female, then the young
in Indian file. Female and young do not take their eyes off father, and imitate all
his gestures with care: one might think the train was a large serpent moving in reeds.
The wolf who like the fox lives in pairs, helps his female and feeds her, but he
does not know his young and will eat them if they come to hand. Certain great apes,
gibbon and orang temporarily monogamous.
Polygamy would be explained by the rarity of males; which is not the case with most
mammals, among whom the males are almost constantly more numerous. Buffon was the
first to note this predominance, neither has he nor has anyone since, given a satisfactory
explanation. People have said that in man, at least, the elder parent gives the sex
to the offspring, and the more surely as the difference in age is greater, but, by
this reckoning one would have almost nothing but males. People have also said that
the younger the woman, the more likely the child to be male. The early marriages
of the past are supposed to have yielded more males than the late marriages of the
present. None of these statements is serious. What remains past doubt is that European
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humanity, to consider only that, gives an excess of males. The general average is
about 105 with extremes of 101 in Russia, and 113 in Greece; the French average is
the same as the general average. One has not been able to make out, in these variations,
either influence of race, or of climate, or of taxes, or of nationality, or anything
else in particular. There are more male humans, more male sheep: it is a fact, which
being regular, will be difficult to explain.
We find here superabundance, there penury of males, but neither does the abundance
determine the customs, nor is it likely the lack of males would do so. There are
so few males among gnats that Fabre was the first to recognize them, the proportion
about one male to ten females. This in no way produces polygamy, for the male dies
the instant after coupling. Nine out of ten gnat females die virgin, and even without
having seen a male, without knowing that males exist: perhaps celibacy augments their
ferocity, for it is the female gnat and she alone who sucks our gore. One supposes
also that female spiders outnumber the males ten or twenty to one: perhaps the buck
who has escaped the jaws of one mistress has the courage to risk his life yet again?
It is possible, the male spider who survives his amours may live on for several years.
Polygamy seems to exist, and in its most refined form, with one sort of spider, the
ctenize, whose males are peculiarly rare. The female digs a nest in the earth, into
which the male descends; he lives there some time, then he leaves, comes back: there
are several houses between which he divides his time equitably.
The polygamy of a curious little fish, the stickleback, is
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of the same sort, although more naive. The male builds a grass nest, then goes in
search of a female, brings her back to the nest, invites her to lay; scarcely has
his first companion departed when he brings in another. He only stops when there
is a satisfactory treasure of eggs, then he fecundates them in the usual manner.
Thence on he guards the nest against malefactors, and watches the hatching. In the
odd reversal of rôles, the young recognize their father; their mother may be
the fish passing between them, or the one gliding off like a shadow, or the one chewing
a grass blade. When the stickleback world becomes reasonable, that is to say absurd,
it will perhaps give itself up to the "recherche de la maternité"?
Their philosophers will demand "Why should the father alone be charged with
the education of his offspring?" Up to the present one knows nothing except
that he educates them with joy and affection. Among sticklebacks and among men there
is no answer to such question save the answer given by facts. One might as well ask
why humanity is not hermaphrodite, like the snails, who strictly divide the pleasures
and burdens of love, for all snails commit the male act, and all lay. Why has the
female ovaries, and the male testicles: and this flower pistils, and this one stamens?
One ends in baby talk. The wish to correct nature is unnecessary. It is hard enough
to understand her, even a little, as she is. When she wishes to establish the absolute
responsibility of the father, she establishes the strict couple, and especially,
absolute polygamy. The pigeon is no longer certain of being the father of his young;
the cock can not doubt it, he being the sole male among all his hens. But nature
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has no secondary intentions, she keeps watch that, temporary or durable, fugitive
or permanent the couples are fecund; that is all.
Gallinaceæ and web feet present certain birds best known and most useful to
us. They are nearly all polygamous. The cock needs about a dozen hens, he can do
with a much larger number, but in that case his ardour wears itself out. The duck,
very licentious, is accused of sodomy. Not only is he polygamous, but anything will
serve him. He might better be a natural example of promiscuity. A gander is good
for ten or twelve geese, the cock pheasant for eight or ten hens. The lyrure tetras
needs many more, he leads a sultan's harem behind him. At dawn, in the season of
amours, the male starts whistling with a noise like steel on a grindstone, simultaneously
stretching himself up, and spreading the fan of his tail, opening and puffing his
wings. When the sun clears the horizon he rejoins his females, dances before them,
while they devour him with their eyes, then he mounts them, according to his caprice,
and with great vivacity.
Polygamy is the rule among herbivore; bulls, bucks, stallions, bison are made to
reign over a troop of females. Domesticity changes their permanent, polygamy into
successive polygamy. Stags go from female to female without tying up to any; the
females follow this example. A specie immediately akin gives, on the contrary, an
example of the couple; the roebuck and his doe live in family, and bring up their
young until these are ready to mate. The male of a certain Asian antelope needs more
than a hundred docile females. Naturally, these
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harems can only be formed by the destruction of other males. This hundred females
represents possibly more than a hundred males put out of business, males being always
the more numerous sex, among mammals. The utility of such hecatombs to the race is
not certain. Doubtless one may suppose that the surviving male is the strongest,
or one of the strongest of his generation, that is the lucky element, but whatever
his vigour it may be expected to wane at some point or other before a hundred females
desiring satisfaction. Some females are forgotten, others fecundated in moments of
weariness: for a certain number of good products, there are a number of mediocre
creations. True, these are destined, if male, to perish in future combats; but if
they are female and if they receive the favours of the chief, this system might have
for consequence the progressive degradation of the specie. It is however, probable
that the necessary equilibrium is re established; combats between females, combats
of coquetry, incitements of femininity, doubtless take place, and it is the triumph
of the malest male and of the most female females.
Virey asserts, in Déterville's "Nouveau dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle,"
that the greater polygamous apes get on very well with women indigenes. It is possible,
but no product has ever been born of these aberrations which we must leave to theological
works on bestialitas. Men and women, even of the Aryan race have at times set out
to prove the radical animality of the human specie by the peculiarity of their tastes.
The interest in these matters is chiefly psychological, and if one can draw no proof
of evolution from the chance relations
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between woman and dog, man and goat, the coupling of primates of different orders
offers no evidence either. There is however a relation between man and apes, it is
that they are both divisible into polygamists and monogamists, at least temporary;
but this does not differentiate them from most other animal species.
In most human races there is a radical polygamy, dissimulated under a show front
of monogamy. Here generalizations are no longer possible, the individual emerges
and with his fantasy upsets all observations, and annihilates all statistics. The
monogamist's brother is polygamous. A woman has known only one man, and her mother
was every one's fancy. One may assert the universal custom of marriage and deduce
monogamy as a conclusion, and this will be false or true according to the epoch,
milieu, race, moral tendencies of the moment. Moral codes are essentially unstable,
since they represent only a hand book ideal of happiness; morality will modify itself
according to the mobility of this ideal.
Physiologically, monogamy is in no way required by the normal conditions of human
life. Children? If the father's help is necessary it can be exercised over the children
of several women as well as over those of one woman only. The duration of tutelage
among civilized people is, moreover, excessive; it is dragged out, when it is a matter
of certain careers, almost until ripe age. Normally puberty ought to liberate the
young human, as it liberates the young of other mammals. The couple need then last
only ten or fifteen years; but female fecundity accumulates children at a year's
interval, so that, as long as the father's virility lasts, there might be
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always one feeble creature having right to demand protection. Human polygamy could
then, never be successive polygamy, save by exception, that is, if man were an obedient
animal, submitting to normal sexual rules, and always fecund; but this successivity
is frequent and divorce has legalized it. The other and true polygamy, polygamy actual,
temporary or permanent, is still less rare among people of European civilization,
but nearly always secret and never legal; it has for corollary a polyandry exercised
under the same conditions. This sort of polygamy is very different from that of Mormons,
Turks, gallinaceæ and antelopes, it is nothing more than promiscuity. It does
not dissolve the couple, in diminishing its tyranny it renders it more desirable.
Nothing so favours marriage, and consequently, social stability, as the de facto
indulgence in temporary polygamy. The Romans well understood this, and legalized
concubinage. One can not here deal with a question so remote from natural questions.
To condense one's answer into briefest possible space, one would say that man, and
principally civilized man, is vowed to the couple, but he only endures it on condition
that he may leave and return to it at will. This solution seems to conciliate his
contradictory tastes, and is more elegant than the one offered by divorce, which
is always the same thing over again; it is in conformity not only with human, but
also with animal tendencies. It is favourable to the species, in assuring the suitable
up bringing of children, and also to the complete satisfaction of a need, which,
in a state of civilization is inseparable either from æsthetic pleasure or
sentimental pleasure.
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CHAPTER XVII
LOVE AM0NG SOCIAL ANIMALS
Organization of reproduction among hymenoptera.– Bees. – Wedding of the queen.– Mother bee, cause and consciousness of the hive.– Sexual royalty.– Limits of intelligence among bees.– Natural logic and human logic.– Wasps.– Bumble bees.– Ants.– Notes on their habits.– Very advanced state of their civilization.– Slavery and parasitism among ants.– Termites.– The nine principal active forms of termites.– Great age of their civilization.– Beavers.– Tendency of industrious animals to inactivity.
SOCIAL hymenoptera, bumble bees, hornets, wasps, bees, have peculiar love customs
very different from those of other animal species. It is not monogamy, since one
finds in it nothing resembling the couple, nor polygamy, since the males know only
one female, when they have even that adventure, and since the females are fecundated
for the whole of their life by a single fecundation. It is, rather, a sort of matriarchate,
even though the queen bee is not generally the mother of more than a part of the
hive whereover she rules, the other part having sprung from the queen who has gone
off with the new swarm, or from the one who has remained in the former hive. In very
numerous hives there are about six or seven hun-
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dred males to one female. Copulation takes place in the air; as is the case with
ants, it is only possible after a long flight has filled with air the pouches which
cause the male's organ to emerge. Between these pockets, or aëriferous bladders
shaped like perforated horns, emerges the penis, a small white body, plump and bent
back at the point. In the vagina, which is round, wide and shallow, the sperm pouch
opens; it is a reservoir which can contain they say, a score of million of spermatozoides,
destined to fecundate the eggs, during several years in proportion as they are to
be laid. The form of the penis and the manner in which the sperm is coagulated by
a viscous liquid into a veritable spermatophore, cause the death of the male. The
copulation ended, he wishes to disengage himself but only manages to do so in leaving
in the vagina not only the penis but all the organs attached to it. He falls like
an empty bag, while the queen, returned to the hive, stops at the entrance, makes
her toilet, aided by the workers who crowd about her: with her mandibles she gently
removes the spine which has remained in her belly, and cleans the place with lustral
attention. Then she enters the second period of her life: maternity. This penis which
remains fast in the vagina makes one think of the darts of fighters which also remain
in the wound; be it love or war the overcourageous beastlet expires, worn 'out and
mutilated; there is in this a peculiar facility of dehiscence which seems very rare.
The wedding of the queen bee remained a long time absolutely mysterious, and even
today there are only a very few observers who have been the distant witnesses
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of it. Réaumur, having isolated a queen and a male, witnessed a play or combat
with movements which he interpreted with ingenuity. He could not see the actual coupling,
which only takes place in the air. His story, is unique and nothing since has confirmed
it. He shows us a queen approaching a male, sucking him with her proboscis, offering
him honey, stroking him with her feet, and finally irritated by the coldness of her
suitor, mounting his back, applying her vulva to the male organ, which Réaumur
describes very well ("Memoirs," tome V) and which he represents as covered
with a white viscous liquid. The real preludes, at least in a state of liberty, contradict
the great observer. The female seems in no way aggressive. Here are the three authentic
accounts I have been able to discover:
"6th July, 1849, M. Hannemann, bee keeper at Wurtemburg, Thuringia was seated
near my hive when his attention was aroused by an unaccustomed buzzing. Suddenly
he saw thirty or forty drones" (i. e., false drones, male bees) "rapidly
pursuing a queen bee, about twenty or thirty feet up in the air. The group filled
a space about two feet in diameter. Sometimes, in their flight, they came as low
as ten feet from the ground, then rose, flying north to south. He followed them about
a hundred yards, then a building interrupted him. The group of drones formed a sort
of cone with the queen at the summit, then the cone enlarged into a globe of which
she was the centre: at this moment the queen succeeded in getting away and rose vertically,
still followed by the drones who had reformed the cone under her."1
1Bienenzeitung (Gazette des Abeilles) janvier, 1850.
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"Some years later the Rev. Millette, at Witemarsh, observed the final phase
of the act. During a hiving, he noticed a flying queen, who an instant later, was
stopped by a male. After having flown about a rod they fell to the ground hooked
to each other. He approached and captured them both, at the very moment when the
male had abandoned himself to the embrace; he carried them to the house and let them
loose in a closed room. The queen, angry, flew toward the window; the male after
dragging himself for an instant across the open palm of the observer's hand, fell
to floor and died. Both male and female had at the tip of the abdomen drops of a
milky white liquid; by squeezing the male, he saw that the male had lost his genital
organs." (Farmer and Gardener, 1859.)
"Having seen the queen go out, M. Carrey closed the entrance of the hive. During
his absence, which lasted a quarter of an hour, three false drones came to the entrance
and finding it closed, continued flying. When the queen on her return was only about
three feet from the hive, one of the drones flew very rapidly toward her, throwing
his legs around her body. They stopped, resting on a long grass blade. Then an explosion
was distinctly heard, and they separated. The drone fell to the ground quite dead,
with 'abdomen much contracted. After a few circles in the air, the mother entered
the hive." (Copulation of the mother bee, in l'Apiculteur, 6e année,
1862.)
Save the remark about the final explosion, these three accounts accord well enough,
and give an exact idea of one of the couplings most difficult to get sight of.
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It is, moreover, the one half obscure point in bee life. One knows all the rest,
their three sexes, rigorously specialized, the precise industry of the wax workers,
the diligence of the collectresses, the political sense of these extraordinary amazons,
their initiatives, when the hive is too full, their starts for the formation of new
swarms, the duels of queens where the populace intervene, the massacre of males as
soon as they are useless, the nurse's art in transforming a vulgar larva into the
larva of a queen, the methodical activity of these republics where all wills, united
in a single conscience, have no other aim but the common well being and the conservation
of the race. It is however these over mechanical virtues which constitute the inferiority
of the bee; the workers are extremely laborious and well behaved, but they lack even
that slight personality which characterizes sexed insects. The much less reasonable
queen is more living, she is capable of jealousy, rage, of despair when she feels
her royalty menaced by the new queen whom the nurses have bred up in secret. Even
the useless, noisy, pillaging, parasitic males, drunk and swollen with vain sperm
are more attractive than the honest workers, and handsomer also, stronger, more slender,
more elegant. Bee lovers generally despise these musketeers, yet it is they who incarnate
the animality, that is to say the beauty of the specie. If it is true as M. Maeterlinck
believes (La Vie des Abeilles), that the most vigorous of seven or eight hundred
males finally seduces the royal virgin, then their laziness, their greediness, their
giddy staggering are but so many virtues.
It seems that the queen and even the workers can
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without fecundation lay eggs which will hatch into males; but copulation is necessary
in order to produce females and queens; now as only the queen can receive the male,
a hive without a queen is doomed. That is the practical point of view, the sexual
point of view leads to other reflections. A female can, quite alone, give birth to
a male: but to have an egg hatch female, it must be fecundated by a male born spontaneously:
one observes here the real exteriorization of the male organ, a segmentation of the
genital power, into two forces, the male force and the female. Thus disunited, it
acquires a new faculty which will fully unfold itself by the reintegration of the
two halves of the initial force into a single force. But why do the virgin born ovules
necessarily give birth to males, among bees, and to females among plant lice? That
is the question defying answer. All that one sees is that parthenogenesis is always
transitory, and that after a number of virginal generations, normal fecundation always
intervenes.
One can not say that the mother bee is a true queen, a veritable chief, but she is
the important personage in the hive, the one without whom life stops. The workers
have the air of being mistresses; in reality their nervous centre is in the queen;
they act only for her, and by her. Her disappearance sets the hive crazy, and drives
it to absurd endeavours, such as the transformation of a nurse into a layer, though
she will give eggs of one sex only, so many useless mouths. In reflecting on this
last expedient one can measure the importance of sex, and understand the absolutism
of its royalty. Sex is king, and there is no royalty save the sexual. The making
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neuter of the workers, which sets them out of norm, if it is a cause of order in
the hive, is above all a cause of death. There are no living creatures save those
who can perpetuate life.
The interest offered by bees is very great, but does not pass that offered by the
observation of most hymenoptera, social or solitary, or of certain neuroptera, such
as termites; or even by beavers, and many birds. But bees have been through many
ages our sugar producers, and they alone; hence man's tenderness for insects more
valuable than all others to him. Their intelligence is well developed, but soon shows
its limitations. People pretend that bees know their master, a manifest error. The
relations of bees and man are purely human. It is evident that they are as ignorant
of man as are all the other insects, and all other invertebrate. They allow themselves
to be exploited, in the sense of their instinct, to the limit of famine and muscular
exhaustion. Virgil's phrase is excessively true, in all the senses one wishes to
take: sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes. (Bees making honey not for yourselves.)
These clever, witty creatures are fooled by the gross fakes of our industrial cunning.
When they have stacked their winter's provisions, honey, into their wax combs, one
removes the honeycombs, and replaces them by sockets of varnished paper: and the
solemn bees, set themselves to forgetting their long labours; before these virgin
combs, they have but one idea: to fill them. They restart work with a bustle which
would excite veritable pity in any man but a bee keeper. These commercials have invented
a hive
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with moveable combs. The bees will never know. Bees are stupid.
But we who see the limits of intelligence in bees, should consider the limits of
our own. There are limits; it is possible to conceive brains who observing us, would
say: men are stupid. All intelligence is limited; it is just this shock against the
limit, against the wall, which by the pain it causes, engenders consciousness. We
are not to laugh too much at the bees who gaily furnish the mobile combs of their
improved hives. We are perhaps the slaves of a master who exploits us, and who will
remain forever unknown. The polygamy, or if one wish, the polyandry of bees, pretext
for this digression, is then purely virtual; it is in the state of possibility, but
it will never be realized, since the fecundity of the queen is assured by a single
act. The excessive multiplicity of males corresponds doubtless to an ancient order
in which the females were more numerous. In any case only two or three males out
of about a thousand, are used, or let us say ten, if you wish to suppose very frequent
swarming, this demonstrates that one must not prejudge the habits of an animal specie
by the overabundance of one sex or another, and that, in a general fashion, one must
place natural logic above our human logic, derived from mathematical logic. Facts
in nature are connected by a thousand knots of which no one is solvable by human
logic. When one of these tangles is unravelled before our eyes we marvel at the simplicity
of its mechanism, we think we understand, we make generalities, we prepare to open
neighbouring mysteries with the same key: illusion. One always has to begin again
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at the start. Thus the sciences of observation become increasingly obscure as one
penetrates further into the labyrinth.
Among wasps and hornets there is nothing resembling polygamy, even potentially. A
fecundated female after passing the winter, constructs, by herself, the first foundations
of a nest, lays the eggs, from which sexless individuals are born; these workers
then assume all material labours, finish the nest, watch the larvæ which the
female continues to produce. These are now males and females: after coupling the
males die, then the workers, the females become languid, those who survive will found
as many new tribes.
The generation of bumble bees is more curious, the differentiation of castes more
complicated. There are among them, males, workers, small females, great females.
A great female, having passed the winter, founds a nest in the earth, often in moss
(there is a sort called the moss bee), she constructs a wax comb, lays. From the
first eggs come workers who, as in wasps, construct the definitive nest, pillage,
make honey, and being more industrious than the other sort of bees who fear dampness,
they scour the country long after sunset. After the workers, the little females see
light; they have no function save laying, without fecundation, the eggs which will
hatch male. Simultaneously the queen produces great females who will soon couple
with the males. Then, as with wasps, all the colony dies except the fecundated great
females, by whom the cycle will recommence, the following spring.
There are three casts of ants, or four if one count the division of neuters into
workers and fighters, as
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among termites. Here, as with bees, the neuters are the base of the republic, the
males die after mating, the females after laying. "There are," says M.
Janet (Recherches sur l'anatomie de la fourmi) "workers so different from the
others, in the development of their mandibles and the largeness of their heads that
one calls them soldiers, a name according with the role they fill in the colony."
These soldiers are also butchers, who cut up prey which is too large or dangerous.
Specialization is the only superiority of the neuters who for the rest seem inferior
to the females and to the males in size, muscling and visual organs. The females
are sometimes half as large again as the neuters, the males being between the two
sizes. The ant shows much more intelligence than the bee. Before this tiny people
one seems really to touch humanity. Consider that the ants have slaves, and domestic
animals. First the plant lice, preferably those who live on roots, and, at need,
those of the rose bush, who are milked, and who permit it, subjected by long heredity.
Aphis formicarum vacca, says Linnæus briefly (beetle the ants' cow). But wandering
herds are not enough for them, they keep in the interior of their ant hills, colonies
of slave plant lice, of domesticated staphylins. The staphylins are small coleoptera
with mobile abdomen, one of their species is only found among ants. They are domesticated
to the point of no longer being able to feed themselves: the ants stuff the necessary
food into their mouths. In return the staphylins furnish their masters a revenue
analogous to that which they get from the plant lice: from the bunch of hairs rising
at the base of their abdomen they seem to
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exude a delectable liquor, at least one sees the ants suck these hairs with great
eagerness. These animals permit it. They are so much at home, that the same observer
(Muller, traduit par Brullé, dans le Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle de
Guérin, au mot Pselaphiens) has seen them coupling without fear in the midst
of the busy ant people, the male hunched on the back of the female, solidly crammed
against the mellifluous tuft of ant's delicacies.
One knows that the red ants make war on the black ants and steal their nymphs, who,
retained in captivity, make them excellent domestics, attentive and obedient. White
humanity also, at one point in its history, found itself faced with a like opportunity,
but less prudent than the red ant, it let it pass, from sentimentalism, thus betraying
its destiny, renouncing, under Christian inspiration, the complete and logical development
of its civilization. Is it not amusing that slavery is presented to us as anti natural,
when it is on the contrary, normal and excessively natural to the most intelligent
of animals? And in an order of ideas more closely related to the subject of this
book, if the making neuter of a part of the population, placing them in castes vowed
to continence, is an anti natural attempt, how is it that social hymenoptera, ants,
bees, bumble bees, and termites among neuroptera, have managed it so well, and have
made it the basis of their social state? Doubtless there is nothing like it among
animals; but mammals, apart from man, that monster, even including beavers, are infinitely
inferior to insects. If the habits of social birds (for there are such) were better
known, one might find analogous
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practices among them. The sexual co operation of all the members of a people being
useless so far as the conservation of the race is concerned; and on the other hand
inferior species living as neighbours to a superior species being destined to disappear,
slavery is good for the inferiors as it assures them perpetuity and a sort of evolution
suited to their feebleness.
A little brown ant, the anergates, having no workers establishes itself as parasite
in an ant hill and gets itself served by workers of another species in order to live.
What ingenuity of the sexed, what docility of the sexless! The worker ants are clearly
degenerate females, among whom sexual sensibility has been completely transformed
into maternal sensibility. One observes, moreover, in many species an intermediate
type of womanworker, who gives the key to this evolution. One should note that after
fecundation the females do not all reenter the city; where they fall, they build,
as mother bumble bees, a provisory nest, acting then like workers, and await the
first egg laying, which will produce exclusively real workers and will thereby permit
the normal construction of the new ant hill.
There are among ants, as among butterflies, hermaphrodites along the medial line,
or sometimes along an oblique line: this gives absurd creatures, half one thing,
half the other, or singularities such as a female with a worker's head who functions
as a worker.1
Polygamy by massacre of males, as among herbivore, and gallinaceae seems a step toward
a more logical and
1E. Rambert, after A. Forel, les Mþ
rs des fourmis
(Bibliothèque universelle, tome LV).
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more economic distribution of the sexes. If antelopes perpetuate themselves very
well with one male to an hundred females, is it not an indication that a part at
least of the sacrificed males might have dispensed with being born? And would it
not be better, in the interest of the antelopes, that a part of these males, if they
ought to continue to be born, should be normally sexless, as with termites, and entrusted
with some social duty?
The organization of termites is very pretty; it will do to finish off this brief
review of animal societies founded on the unsexing of sexes. One has already noted,
in the chapters on dimorphism, the diversity of sexual forms, corresponding to four
quite distinct castes. The minute examination of one of their republics permits one
to assert differentiations much more numerous, for each of the principal castes passes
through active larval and nymphal forms, adolescent forms, such as most neuroptera
and libellules also present. In taking count of all the nuances one may observe in
a state (to use the familiar word) of termites fifteen different forms, all with
marked characteristics. The principal are: 1. Workers, 2. Soldiers, 3. Small males,
4. Small females, 5. Large males, 6. Large females, 7. Nymphs with little cases,
8. Nymphs with long cases, 9. Larvæ. When one attacks an ant hill, the soldiers
arrive at the breach, very threatening, odd, with their bodies all head, all mandibles.
The enemy routed, the workers come to repair the damage. There are sometimes several
female egg layers; sometimes there is only one male: copulation always takes place
outside the hill, and as with ants, the males perish, while the fecundated females
become
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the origin of a new state. The expeditions of travelling termites, common as fighting
termites in South Africa, are naturally directed by soldiers. Sparmann (cited in
Guérin's Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle) observed them during his voyage
to the Cape, and says they behave rather as non coms in close rank, or climbing onto
grass blades, watch the defile, beating with their feet, if the order were bad, or
too slow. The signal is at once understood, and obeyed by the rank at once, is answered
by a whistle. There is in this something so marvellous that one hesitates to accept
the traveller's interpretation in entirety. It is not the spontaneous and mechanical
discipline of the ants, but the consenting obedience, so difficult to obtain from
inferior humanities. After all, nothing is impossible, and without being credulous
in these matters, one need be astonished at nothing. Nevroptera are, moreover, exceeding
old on the earth; they date from before the coal beds: their civilization is some
thousands of centuries older than human civilizations.
Beavers are the only mammals, man excepted, whose industry indicates an intelligence
near that of insects. But their societies offer no complication, they are a simple
grouping of couples. They do not construct their dams until the females have been
delivered, this happens toward the end of July; one sees no other connection between
their sexual habits and their remarkable works.
These enormous trees felled and made to lie where intended, these piles stuck in
the river bed and interbound with twisted branches, these impermeable dams,
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all this hard and complicated work, the beaver accepts when pushed by necessity.
He needs an artificial lake with unvarying depth; if he finds one made by nature,
he accepts it, and limits himself to erecting his regular huts. Thus osmies, chalicodomes,
or xylocopes,öor men, if they find by chance a nest prepared, hasten to profit by
it. The instinct of construction is by no means blind; it is a faculty which will
not be employed very often save in extremity: the present inhabitant of the Loire
valley still arranges the caves for domestic use. To its injury, but of that it knows
nothing, the bee profits by the artificial combs slid into its hive. The Rhone beaver
has rested ever since men erected such excellent dams there. The fairy palace which
rises in mid forest for the rubbing of a ring is the human, and animal, ideal.
I must close these observations on natural societies, in pointing out that if they
are today based on something quite different from polygamy, it seems likely that
they were in origin societies either of polygamy or of sexual communism. If one starts
from communism one will very soon evolve either toward the couple, or toward polygamy,
if it is a matter of mammals; or toward sexual neutralization if it is a matter of
insects. The couple, polygamy, neutralization are methods; sexual communism is not
a method, and for that reason one must consider it as the chaos from which order
has little by little emerged.
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CHAPTER XVIII
THE QUESTION OF ABERRATIONS
Two sorts of sexual aberration.– Sexual aberrations of animals.– Those of men.– Crossing of species.– Chastity.– Modesty.– Varieties and localizations of sexual bashfulness.– Artificial creation of modesty.– Sort of modesty natural to all females.– Cruelty.– Picture of carnage.– The cricket eaten alive.– Habits of carabes.– Every living creature is a prey.– Necessity to kill or to be killed.
SEXUAL aberrations are of two sorts. The cause of the error is internal, or external.
The flower of the arum muscivorum (fly catching arum) by its cadaverous odour attracts
flies in search of rotting flesh in which to lay their eggs. Schopenhauer has supported
by this, or analogous, fact a theory just, but somewhat summary, of aberration from
external cause. Aberration from internal cause is sometimes explained by the statement
that the same arteries irrigate and the same nerves animate the region of the sacrum,
anterior and posterior; the excretal canals being always near each other, and sometimes
common, at least for part of their length. One has spoken seriously of the drake's
sodomy, but anatomy refuses to understand it. Whether a drake frequents another drake
or a duck, he addresses himself in both cases to the single door of a vestibule into
which all excre-
172
tions are poured. Doubtless the drake is aberrated, and his accomplice still more
so, but nature deserves part of the blame. In general, animal aberrations require
very simple explanations. There is a keen desire, and very urgent need, which if
unsatisfied produces an inquietude, which may augment until a sort of momentary madness
takes hold of the animal, and throws it blindly upon all sorts of illusions. This
may go, doubtless, to the point of hallucination. There is also a need, purely muscular,
of at least sketching in the sexual act, either passive or active; one sees, by singular
inversion, cows in heat mounting each other, perhaps with the idea of exciting the
male, or perhaps the visual representation which they make themselves of the desired
act, forces them to try an imitation: it is a marvellous example, because it is absurd,
of the motor force of images.
There are two parts in the sexual act; that of the specie, and that of the individual;
but that of the specie is only given it by means of the individual. In relation to
the male in rut, it is a question of a very simple natural need. He must empty his
spermatic canals: lacking females they say the stag rubs his prong on trees to provoke
ejaculation. Bitches in heat rub their vulva on the ground. Such are the rudiments
of onanism, suddenly carried by primates to such a high degree of perfection. One
has seen male cantharides, themselves ridden, riding other males; the argule, a small
crustacean parasite of fresh water fish, is so ardent that he often addresses himself
to other males, or to gravid or even dead females. From the microscopic beasts to
man, aberration is everywhere; but one should, rather, call it,
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at least among animals, impatience. Animals are by no means mere machines, they,
as well as men, are capable of imaginations, they dream, they have illusions, they
are subject to desires whose source is in the interior movement of their organism.
The sight or odour of a female over excites the male; but far from any female, the
logic of the vital movement suffices perfectly to put them in a state of rut; it
is absolutely the same with females. If the state of rut, and if the sensibilization
of the genital parts is established far from necessary sex, we have here a natural
cause of aberration, for it is this special sensibility which must be used: the first
simulacrum, or even the first propitious obstacle will be the adversary against which
the exasperated animal exercises the energy by which he is tormented.
One may apply the general principles of this psychology to man, but on condition
that we do not forget that man's genital sensibility is apt to be awakened at any
moment, and that for him the causes of aberration are multiplied ad infinitum. There
would be extremely few aberrated men and women if moral customs permitted a quite
simple satisfaction of sexual needs, if it were possible for the two sexes to meet
always at the opportune moment. There would remain aberrations of anatomical order;
they would be less frequent and less tyrannic, if our customs, instead of contriving
ways to make sexual relations very difficult, should favour them. But this easiness
is only possible, in promiscuity, which is possibly a worse ill than aberration.
Thus all questions are insoluble, and one can only improve nature by disorganizing
her. Human order is often a disorder worse than
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spontaneous disorder, because it is a forced and premature finality, an inopportune
turning of the vital river out of its course.
Sexual selection is probably not a source of variation (i. e., of type); its role
is, on the contrary, to keep the specie in statu quo. The causes of variation are
probably changes of climate, the nature of the soil, the general milieu, and also
disease, the troubles of blood and nerve circulationöperhaps certain sexual aberrations.
I say, "perhaps," for the cross breeding between individuals of different
species, living in liberty, seems difficult, as soon as the species is really something
different from a variety in evolution, a form still seeking itself. At that stage
anything is possible; but one is speaking of species (i. e., set species). Mules,
bardots, leporides are artificial products; one has never found them in free nature.
It is very difficult to obtain the copulation of a hare and she rabbit; the she rabbit
is refractory and the hare lacking enthusiasm. The mare very often refuses the ass;
if she turns her head at the moment of his mounting, one has to bandage her eyes
to overcome her disgust; it is the same with the she ass whom one offers a stallion
for producing the bardot. As for the product of bull and mare, the celebrated jumart
is a chimæra: comparison of the meagre prong of the bull to the massive one
of the stallion is enough to convince one that such dissimilar instruments can not
replace each other. Nevertheless it would be imprudent wholly to rule out this form
of sexual aberration from the causes of variability of species. That is perhaps one
of its justifications.
Of all sexual aberrations perhaps the most curious is
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chastity. Not that it is anti natural, nothing is anti natural, but because of the
pretexts it obeys. Bees, ants, termites, present examples of perfect chastity, but
of chastity that is utilized, social chastity. Involuntary, congenital, the neuter
state among insects is a state de facto, equivalent to the sexual state, and the
origin of a characterized activity. In humans it is a state, often only apparent
or transitory, obtained voluntarily or demanded by necessity, a precarious condition,
so difficult to maintain that people have heaped up about it all sorts of moral and
religious walls, and even real walls made of stones and mortar. Permanent and voluntary
chastity is nearly always a religious practice. Men, in all ages, have been persuaded
that perfection of being was only obtainable by such renunciation. This seems absurd;
it is, on the contrary, very direct logic. The only means of not being an animal
is to abstain from the act to which all animals without exception deliver themselves.
It is the same motive that has made people imagine abstinence, fasting; but as one
can not live without eating, and as one can live without making love, this second
method of perfectionment has remained in the state of outline.
It is true, asceticism, of which humanity alone is capable, is one of the means which
may lift us above animality; but by itself it is insufficient to do this; by itself
it is good for nothing, save perhaps to excite sterile pride; one must add to it
an active exercise of the intelligence. It remains to know whether asceticism, which
deprives the sensibility of one of its healthiest and most stimulating nutriments
is favourable to the exercise of the
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intelligence. As it is not the least necessary to answer this question here, we will
say nothing save this, provisorily: one need not scorn chastity nor disdain asceticism.
Is modesty an aberration? Indulgent observers have believed that they noticed it
in elephants as well as in rabbits. The modesty of the elephant is a popular maxim
which makes right minded women cast sheep's eyes, in circuses, at the great beast
who hides for her amours. During copulation, says a celebrated rabbit raiser1 "the male and female should be alone, in demiobscurity.
This solitude and obscurity are more necessary in view of the fact that certain females
show signs of modesty." The modesty of animals is a fancy. Like modesty among
humans, it is merely the mask of fear, the crystallization of timorous habits, necessitated
by the animals being unarmed during coupling. This is very well known and needs no
explanation. But the need of reproduction is so tyrannic that, even among the most
timid animals, it does not always leave them presence of mind enough to hide themselves
during the amour. The most domesticated of animals, one knows it only too well, shows
at this moment neither fear nor shame.
In man, among the civilized and among the uncivilized, sexual fear, shame, has taken
a thousand forms which, for the most part, seem to have no longer any relation to
the original feeling whence they are derived. One notices however that if the milieu
where the couple finds itself is such that no attack, no ridicule is to be feared,
shame
1Mariot Didieux, Guide pratique de l'éducateur
de lapins. Bibliothèque des professions industrielles et agricoles, série
H.
177
vanishes, in part, or entirely, according to the degree of security, and the degree
of excitement. For a crowd of populace on a fete night there is hardly any modesty
save "legal modesty"; the example of one bolder couple is enough, if there
is no authority to be feared, to set loose all the appetites, and one then sees clearly
that man who does not hide in order to eat, only hides to make love under pressure
of usage.
From the genital act, modesty is stretched over the exterior sexual organs by a mechanism
very simple and very logical. But here, I think, one must distinguish between genital
modesty bred from the custom of clothing the whole body, and that which has led men
to cover only a particular part. Heat, cold, rain, insects explain clothing, but
not the savage's cotton drawers or the fig leaf; especially when the leaf' imposed
on married women, for example, is forbidden to virgins, or when this symbolic leaf
is so reduced that it serves no purpose, save that of a sign. In this last case,
it has not even any direct relation to genital modesty; it is only a matrimonial
ornament, analogous to the ring or the collar, a sign, indeed indicating a condition.
It is possible also, that among certain peoples where the men go entirely naked,
the women wear an apron merely to keep off flies, gad flies, rather as a peasant
drapes his horse's muzzle with grass and leaves. Quite often, however, one is forced
to recognize in these customs, the proof of a particular genital sensibility, analogous
to civilized modesty. An English sailor, at the time of the first explorations got
himself rejected by the Maori women not because he appeared without clothing, a
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state which custom required, but because he appeared with his organ unsheathed. This
detail shocked them extremely. A curious example of the localization of shame: all
parts of the body could and should show themselves, all save this small surface.
On reflection, the modesty of Europeans at a ball or on the beach is almost as absurd
as that of the Maoris, or as that of the fellaheen women who at the approach of a
stranger remove their shirts, their sole garments, in order to cover their faces.
Sexual modesty, as one observes it today, among the most various peoples, is utterly
artificial. Livingstone assures us that he developed modesty in little Kaffir girls
by clothing them. Surprised in négligé, they covered their breastsöand
this in a race where the women go wholly naked, save for a string round the middle,
from which another string hangs. Clothing is only one of the causes of modesty, or
of customs which give us the illusion of it, and the sentiment of fear associated
with the sexual act does not explain all the rest. There is a shame particular to
the female, an ensemble of movements, which one can assimilate to nothing, which
one can attach to nothing. The gesture of Venus modest is not purely a woman's gesture;
nearly all females, especially mammifers, have it; the female, who refuses, lowers
her tail and clamps it between her legs; there is here, evidently, the origin of
one of the particular forms of modesty. We have given characteristic examples in
an earlier chapter.
Man is un-get-at-able; the slightest of his habitual sentiments has multiple and
contradictory roots in a
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sensibility variable and always excessive. He is the least poised and the least reasonable
of all animals, although the only one who has been able to construct for himself
an idea of reason; he is an animal lunatic, that is to say one who flows out on all
sides, who unravels everything in theory, and tangles up everything in fact, who
desires and wills so many things, who throws his muscles into so many divers activities
that his acts are at once the most sensible and the most absurd, the most conforming
and the most opposed to the logical development of life. But he profits even by error,
especially by the error fatal to all animals, and that constitutes his originality,
as Pascal noted, and as Nietzsche repeats.
If the word modesty (pudeur) is not exact, when applied to animals, although one
finds in their habits the distant origin of this complex and refined sentiment, the
word cruelty, is not so either, when applied to their natural acts of defence or
nutrition. Human cruelty is often an aberration; the cruelty of beasts is a necessity,
a normal fact, often the very condition of their existence. An anarchist philosopher,
ardent and naïve disciple of Jean Jacques believed that he traced an universal
altruism in nature; he has redone with other words and another spirit, and a few
new examples, the infantile works of Bernardin de Saint Pierre, and has abused, under
pretext of inclining mankind to kindness, the right which one has to promenade about
nature without seeing and without understanding her. Nature is neither good, nor
evil, nor altruist, nor egoist; she is an ensemble of forces whereof none cedes save
under superior pressure. Her conscience is that of a balance; being of a perfect
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indifference, it is of an absolute equity. But the sensibility of a balance is of
a single order, single dimension; the sensibility of nature is infinite, to all actions
and reactions. Whether the strong devour the weak, or the weak the strong, there
is no compensation save in our human illusion; in reality one life is enlarged at
the expense of another life, in one case as in the other, the total energy has been
neither diminished nor augmented. There is neither strong, nor weak, there is a level
which tends to remain constant. Our sentimentalism makes us see dramas where nothing
occurs more disturbing than the general facts of nutrition. One may however look
at these facts a little more closely, and then the parity of animal organism and
the human organism will lead us to qualify as cruel, certain acts which would deserve
this title if committed by man. One must say cruelty in order to understand it oneself;
it is also necessary to remember that this cruelty is unconscious, that it is not
felt by the devouring animal, that no element of ill will enters into its act, and
that man himself, the judge, in no way deprives himself of eating live creatures
when they are better raw than cooked living than dead.
A philanthe, sort of wasp, catches a bee to feed its larvæ; while carrying
the prey to his nest, he presses the belly, sucks the bee, empties it of all its
honey. But at the entrance of the nest a mantis is waiting, its double saw of an
arm is unfolded, the philanthe is nipped in passing. And one sees the mantis gnawing
the belly of the philanthe while the philanthe continues sucking the bee's belly.
And the mantis is so voracious that you
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can cut her in two without making her let go; a chain, truly, of carnage.
The larvæ of the sphex, another wasp, are fed on live crickets that have been
paralyzed by a stab. As soon as it hatches the larva attacks the cricket in the belly
at the chosen spot where the egg has been rayed. The poor insect protests by feeble
movements of antennæ, and mandibles: in vain; he is eaten alive, fibre by fibre,
by a great worm which gnaws his entrails, and with so great a skill that it begins
on the parts not essential to life, and thus keeps the prey fresh and tasty to the
last. Such is the gentleness of nature, the good mother.
The carabes are fine coleoptera, violet, purple, and golden. They feed only on living
prey, which they chew slowly, beginning at the belly, and boring slowly into the
palpitating cavity. Helices, and slugs are thus torn apart by bands of carabes who
dig them up and dissect them in a boiling of saliva.
Such are theft and murder, in nature. These are the normal acts. Herbivorous species
alone are innocent perhaps from imbecility; always occupied in eating, because their
food is so unsubstantial, they have not time to develop their powers: they are the
inevitable prey, a sort of superior grass which will be browsed at the first opportunity.
But the carnivora are in the same way eaten by their stronger and more adroit fellow
boarders. Very few beasts have a quiet death. The geotrupes, scarabs, necrophores
their work finished, the egg laying accomplished, devour each other to pass the time,
perhaps, to lend a little gaiety to their last moments. Animals are of but two sorts,
hunters and game, but
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there is scarcely a hunter who is not game in his turn. One does not find in nature
the purely human invention of breeding for slaughter, or the more extraordinary one
of breeding for hunting. Ants know how to milk their cows, the plant lice, or their
goats the staphylins; they do not know how to fatten them and to slit their gullets.
A hundred other signs of animal cruelty are scattered through this book. One may collect many others, and this might form a work edifying in this era of sentimentalism. Not because one wishes– quite the contrary– to offer them to men as so many examples; but because this might teach them that the first duty of a living being is to live, and that all life is nothing but a sum sufficient of murders. Men or tigers, sphex or carabes are under the same necessity: to kill or to die, or to shed blood or eat grass. But to eat grass, is not much better than suicide: ask the lambkins.
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CHAPTER XIX
INSTINCT
Instinct.– Can one oppose it to intelligence?– Instinct in man.– Primordiality of intelligence.– Instinct's conservative rôle.– Modifying rôle of intelligence.– Intelligence and consciousness.– Parity of animal and human instinct.– Mechanical character of the instinctive act.– Instinct modified by intelligence.– Habit of work creates useless work.– Objections to the identification of instinct and intelligence taken from life of insects.
THE question of instinct is perhaps the most nerve racking there is. Simple minds
think they have solved it when they have set against this word the other word: intelligence.
That is merely the elementary position of the problem. Not only does it explain nothing,
but it opposes all explanations. If instinct and intelligence are not phenomena of
the same order, reducible one to the other, the problem is insoluble and we will
never know what instinct is, nor what is intelligence.
In the vulgar contrast one overhears the considerable naïveté that animals
have instinct and man, intelligence. This error, pure rhetoric, has prevented, up
to the present, not the answer to the question which still seems a long way off,
but the scientific exposure of the question itself. It includes but two formulæ:
Either instinct is a fructification of intelligence; or intelligence is an aug-
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mentation of instinct. One must choose, and know that in choosing one makes, as the
case may be, either instinct or intelligence, the seed or flower of a single plant:
the sensibility.
One will first establish that for manifestations of instinct and for those of intelligence,
there is no essential difference between man and animals. The life of all men, quite
as well as that of all animals, is based on instinct, and doubtless there is no animal
who can not give signs of spontaneity, that is to say, of intelligence. Instinct
seems anterior because in all animals except man the quantity and especially the
quality of instinctive facts greatly surpasses the value and number of intellectual
facts. This is so, but in admitting this hierarchy, if one thereby explain with considerable
difficulty, the formation of intelligence in man and in the animals which show more
or less perceptible gleams of it, one also renounces by so doing, all later attempts
that might furnish some notions as to the formation of instinct. If the bee makes
his combs mechanically, if this act is as necessary as the evaporation of warmed
water, or the crystallization of freezing water, it is useless to search any further:
one is in the presence of a fact which will never yield anything else.
If, on the contrary, one consider intelligence as anterior, the field of investigation
stretches out to infinity and instead of one problem radically insoluble, one has
a hundred thousand or more, as many as there are animal species, and of these problems
none is simple, none absurd. This manner of looking at it, brings, I admit, grave
consequences. One must then look at matter as
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a simple allotropic form of intelligence, or, if you prefer, consider intelligence
and matter as equivalents, and admit that intelligence is merely matter endowed with
sensibility, and that its power of extremely diversifying itself finds impassable
limits in the very forms which clothe it. Instinct is the proof of these limits.
When acts have become instinctive, they have become invincible. A specie is a group
of instincts whose tyranny becomes, one day., deaf to all attempts at movement. Evolution
is limited by the resistance of what is, striving against what might be. There comes
a moment when a specie is a mass too heavy to be moved by intelligence: then it remains
in its place; this is death, but is compensated by the steady arrival of other species;
new forms assumed by the inexhaustible Proteus.
One will add nothing, here, to this theory, save a few facts favourable to it, and
a handful of objections.
The old distinction between intelligence and instinct although false and superficial,
may be adapted to the views just abbreviated. We will attribute to instinct the series
of acts which tend to conserve the present condition of a specie; and to intelligence,
those which tend to modify that condition. Instinct will be slavery, subjection to
custom; intelligence will represent liberty, that is to say, choice, acts which while
being necessary, since they occur, have yet been determined ensemble of causes anterior
to those which govern instinct. Intelligence will be the deep, the reserve, the spring
which after long digging emerges between the rocks. In everything that intelligence
suggests, the consciousness of the species makes a departure; what is useful is incorporated
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in instinct, enlarging and diversifying it; what is useless perishesöor perhaps flowers
in extravagances, as it does in man, in dancing and gardening birds, or the magpies
attracted by a jewel, larks by a mirror! One will then call instinct, the series
of useful aptitudes; intelligence, the series of aptitudes de luxe: but what is useful,
what useless? Who will dare brand a series of bird notes or a feminine smile as lacking
utility? There is neither utility nor inutility unless there be also finality. But
finality can not be considered as an aim; it is nothing but a fact, and one which
might be other.
This utilization of old terms, if it were possible, could never be the pretext for
a new radical differentiation between instinct and intelligence; one could only use
it to define by contrast two states whose manifestations present appreciable nuances.
The great objection to the essential identification of instinct and intelligence
comes from a habit of mind which spiritistic philosophy has for long imposed upon
us: instinct should be unconscious, intelligence, conscious. But psychological analysis
does not permit us rigorously to tie intellectual activity to consciousness. Without
consciousness, every thing might happen, even in the most thoughtful man, exactly
as it does under the paternal eye of this consciousness. In M. Ribot's interesting
analogic comparison, consciousness is an internal candle lighting a clock face; it
has the same influence on the movement of the intelligence that this candle has on
the clock. It is difficult to know whether animals have consciousness, and it is
perhaps useless, unless at least, one admit that this candle, by its luminous or
calorific rays, does, as M. Fouillée teaches,
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affect the march of the mechanism. In sum, consciousness also is a fact, and no fact
dies without consequences; there are neither first causes nor last causes. In any
case one will, since it is evident, cling to one statement that even if consciousness
is a possible reactive, intelligence can act without it: the most conscious of men
have phases of unconscious intellectuality; long series of reasonable acts may be
committed without their reflection being visible in the mirror, without the candle
being lit before the clock. In brief, it does not seem as if nervous matter could
exist without intelligence or sensibility; but consciousness is an extra. There is
no need to take count of the old scholastic objection to the identification of the
intelligence and the instinct.
What is there serious in the other objection: that man, if he once had instincts,
has lost them?
The animal having the richest instincts ought also to have, or to have had, the richest
intelligence. And reciprocally: intellectual activity supposes a greatly varied instinctive
activity, either in the present or in the future. If man have not instincts, he ought
to be in the way of making them. He has numerous instincts, and makes more every
day: a part of his consciousness is constantly crystallizing itself into instinctive
acts.
But if one consider the different instincts of animal species one will scarcely find
any which are not also human. The great human activities are instinctive. Doubtless
man may refrain from building a palace, but he can not dispense with a cabin, a nest
in a cave, or in the fork of a tree, like the great apes, many mammals, birds, and
most insects. His food depends very little on
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choice, it must contain certain indispensable elements: a necessity identical with
that which rules the animals, and even the plants whose roots reach down toward the
desired juice, and whose branches reach toward the light. Song, dance, strife, and,
for the group, war; human instincts are not unknown to all animals. The taste for
brilliant things, another human instinct is frequent enough in birds; it is true
that birds have not yet made anything of it, and that man has evolved the sumptuary
arts. There remains love, but I think this supreme instinct is the consecrated limit
of the objections.
Useful acts habitually repeated may become invincible, like veritable instinctive
movements. A hunter1 spending the winter in an isolated
cabin in Canada engaged an Indian woman to keep house for him. She arrives in the
evening, melts the snow, begins to wash up, shifts everything, prevents his getting
any sleep. He rages. Silence. As soon as he is asleep, the woman mechanically begins
to work again, and so on, until the humble Indian gets the last word. Here, exactly
as among insects, one has the example of work which once begun must go on until it
is finished. The insect can not be interrupted; if it is interrupted by external
cause it starts work again not at the point where it actually finds the work, but
at the point where it, the insect, left off. Thus, one entirely removed the nest
which a chalicodome was building on a shingle; the bee returns, finds nothing, since
there is nothing to find, but instead of recommencing the building, continues it.
There was nothing to be done but close the hole; the bee doses it, that is to say
she deposits the last
1Vide Milton and Cheaddle, works already cited.
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mouthful of mortar on the ideal dome of an absent nest: then with instinct satisfied,
sure of having assured her posterity, she retires, she goes to die. One can get the
same result with the pélopée, and with other builders. Processional
caterpillars are accustomed to make long trips in Indian file on the branches of
their native pine tree, in search of food: if one place them on the rim of a basin
they will stupidly circulate for thirty hours, without one of them having the idea
of interrupting the circle by going off at a tangent. They will die in their track,
stuck fast in obedience; when one falls another steps into his place, the ranks close,
that is all. Here are the extremities of instinct, and to our great surprise they
are almost the same in an Indian of the great lakes and in a processional pine caterpillar.
But other cases of animal's instinct joining with free intelligence, give examples
of human sagacity. We have seen these same mason bees and xylocopes and domestic
bees profit eagerly by a nest ready made, by a hole bored in wood, by artificial
combs set ready to take their honey; the osmies, who lay in the stalks of cut reeds,
in which they arrange a series of chambers, accommodated themselves under Fabre's
guidance in glass tubes which permitted the great observer to know them intimately.
Instinct is by turns as stupid as a machine and as intelligent as a brain; these
two extremes should correspond with very ancient and very recent habits. It is certainly
but a relatively short time since the peasant's pruning bill began preparing cut
reeds for the osmie; before that time she constructed her nest, as she still does,
in empty snail shells or in some natural cavity. They are very
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interesting these osmies, extremely active solitary bees; one sees them having exhausted
their ovaries, but not their muscular force, building extra nests, provisioning them
with honey, without having laid a single egg in them; they will even make and close
them without honey, if they do not find more flowers, thus showing a real craziness
for work, an authentic mania analogous to that which moves man to move pebbles, to
smoke, to drink rather than remain immobile.1 If
the osmie lived longer, she might perhaps invent some game which, vain at the start,
would end by becoming both a need and a benefit to the whole species.
The theory which makes instinct a partial crystallization of intelligence is extremely
seductive: I dare say we will have to accept it as true. Yet the contemplation of
the insect world raises an enormous objection. In the course of his wonderful memoirs
Fabre has formulated it ten times and with always fresh ingenuity. Here is the insect,
nearly always born adult, and after the death of her parents, she has received from
them neither direct education nor education by example, as do the young of birds
or mammals. A hen teaches her chick to scratch for worms (it is true that she does
not teach her ducklings to dabble in puddles, and they are her despair, to our amusement),
an osmie can teach its young nothing. Yet now osmies do exactly what their ancients
have done. The insect opens its shell, brushes its antennæ, performs its toilet,
opens its wings, flies off for life, moves without
1Compare this with the valuable remarks of a gamekeeper,
"One must know the habits of animals, even their manias, for they have them,
just as we do." Figaro, 31, Aug. 1903.
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hesitation toward the pasture it needs, recognizes and flees the enemies of its race,
makes love, and finally constructs a nest identical with the cradle from which it
has emerged.1
One sees quite well that the acquisitions of the individual have passed to the descendant,
but how? How have they fixed themselves in the nerves and blood during a few short
days of life? Without any apprenticeship the sphex paralyzes with three stabs the
cricket which is to feed its larvæ; if the cricket is killed and not paralyzed,
the larvæ will die, poisoned by the carrion; and if the paralysis is not durable
the cricket will come to, and destroy the sphex in the egg. The manþ
1To my mind a slight unsoundness creeps into Chap.
XVI, and here both Fabre and Gourmont seem to me to go astray in considering the
insect as a separate creature, i. e. a creature cut off from its larva or cocoon
life. Surely the animal may be supposed to exist while in its cocoon or larva, it
may reasonably be supposed to pass that period in reflection, preparing for precisely
the acts of its desire (as for example an intelligent young man might pass his years
in a university under professors, awaiting reasonable maturity to act or express
his objections). The larva has its months of quiet, precisely the necessary pre reflection
for the two days' joy ride of exterior manifestation, amours, etc., its contemplatio,
or what may be counted as analogous, passing in its cell. The perfection and precision
of its acts, being, let us say, proportionate to the non expressive period. Having
spent God knows how long in that possibly monotonous nest, it seems small wonder
that the insect should know the pattern by heart. Small wonder, that is to say wonder
not incommensurate with the general wonder of the whole process. öE. P.
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mals, and that its genius is only the sum of intellectual acquisitions slowly crystallized
in the specie.1 As for the mechanism of this transformation
of intelligence into instinct, it has for motive the principle of utility; intelligent
acts which are useful for the preservation of the specie, are the only ones which
pass into instinct.
The science of these hymenoptera goes so far that it was ahead of human science until
yesterday. The insect attacks the nervous system; it knows that the power of beginning
a movement lies in the nervous system and not in the limbs. If the nervous system
is centralized as in weevils, their enemy the cerceris gives only one dagger stab;
if the movement depends on three ganglia, it gives three stabs; if on nine ganglia,
nine: thus does the shaggy ammophile when it needs the caterpillar of the noctuelle,
commonly called the gray worm, for its larvæ; if a single sting in the cervical
ganglion appears too dangerous, the hunter limits himself to chewing it gently, in
order to induce the necessary degree of immobility. It is odd that the social hymenoptera
who know how to do so many difficult things, are ignorant of this savant dagger play.
The bee stings at random, and so brutally that she mutilates herself while often
inflicting but an insignificant wound on her adversary. Collective civilization has
diminished the individual genius.
1Vide translator's postscript.
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CHAPTER XX
TYRANNY OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM
Accord and discord between organs and acts.– Tarses and sacred scarab.– The hand of man.– Mediocre fitness of sexual organs for copulation.– Origin of "luxuria."– The animal is a nervous system served by organs.– The organ does not determine the aptitude.– Man's hand inferior to his genius.– Substitution of one sense for another.– Union and role of the senses in love.– Man and animal under the tyranny of the nervous system.– Wear and tear of humanity compensated by acquisitions.– Man's inheritors.
IT IS a universal belief that nature or God, in their wisdom, have made the corporal
organs in the best possible form: perfection of the eye, of the hand, of the paw
jaw of the mantis, of the sexual apparatus of man, of the bird or the scarab, the
furnishing tarses of hymenoptera, the beaver's tail, the grasshopper's hams, the
cicada's tambourine. It is sometimes true and very often false. It happens that there
appears an exact concord between the organ and the act which it is to perform; but
it happens also, and that not rarely, that the organs seem in no way fashioned for
the deed they must accomplish: most of them are indeed chance tools, with which the
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creature manages, as he can, the acts which he wants to, or should, do.
The forefeet of scarabs are so little destined for modelling and rolling mud balls
that their tarses are worn out in the process, as human fingers would perhaps be
worn if they had to knead the raw clay and mortar. In considering the scarab one
has to think of a humanity lacking fingers, having lost them by a long and slow diminution
of nails, bones, flesh. The scarab is a modeller, nothing would be more useful to
him than fingers; instead of losing them by use, he ought to have grown them longer
and more supple. He has lost them, and it is with the arm stumps that he turns the
little balls which are to be food for himself or his offspring. This insect is condemned
to a labour that will become increasingly difficult as the species grows increasingly
older. It remains to know whether the ancestors of the sacred scarab had tarses.
Horus Apollo grants them as many fingers as the month has days, that is thirty, which
corresponds quite well with the six feet and five tarses of the scarab. If he was
a good observer, the question is answered, but a single testimony is insufficient,
and moreover it is unlikely that so great a wearing away would have occurred in so
small a number of centuries. Horus, and a savant like Latreille himself, have been
the dupes of symmetry; if either has looked closely at a scarab, and if he has seen
the forefeet lacking tarses, he has put this down to chance or to accident. Fabre
has at least noted one indisputable fact, it is that neither as nymph nor adult has
the scarab tarses on his forefeet. If it ever had them, our reasoning draws new vigour
from the negation, for then less than
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ever is it possible to find the least logical concordance between the insect's stumps
and the need of modelling and turning to which nature condemns it.
This scarab is a type to which one can relate a great number of other examples: purveyor
hymenoptera are wholly deprived of tools adapted to their work as quarrymen and well
diggers: thus, at the end of their labours the greater part of these fragile insects
are very much damaged. One knows the beaver's constructions, but who without the
certitude we have gained by observation, would have dared to attribute them to these
great rats?
Eighteenth century philosophers set themselves the question: Is man man because he
has hands; or has he hands because he is man? One may answer boldly, that man's hands
marvellous as they appear to us, add almost nothing to his intelligence. One does
not see that they are indispensable for anything save for playing the piano. What
constitutes man is his intelligence, his nervous system. The exterior organ is secondary:
no matter what exterior organ, beak, prehensile tail, teeth, proboscis, paws would
have done the work of the hands. There are birds' nests which no manual cleverness
could weave.
The reproductive organs are no better adapted to their purpose than are the working
organs. Doubtless they attain very often their end, but at the cost of efforts which
a better disposition would have attenuated or eliminated altogether. The interior
mechanism is, or seems, marvellous; the external mechanism is rudimentary and gives
no result, save, as they say, thanks to the ever renewed ingenuity of the couples.
Instinct, in one of its most necessary acts, is often put to difficult proof.
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The plausible adventure of Daphnis has been presumably often repeated, even though
the limberness of the human form is well suited to coition; but who has not been
surprised to see a heavy bull leap clumsily onto a lowing cow, bending his useless
hocks along her back, panting, and often not succeeding save thanks to the good offices
of a farm hand? Among beavers, says A. de Quatrefages (Orbigny's "Dictionnaire
d'histoire naturelle"), the external orifice of the generative organs opens
in a cloaca so placed under the tail that one hardly understands how the coupling
takes place.
Certain matings are sheer tours de force, and the animal whether it be the scutillary,
a tiny insect, or the elephant, a colossus, is compelled to take positions absolutely
different from its normal postures. Nature who firmly intends the perpetuity of the
species, has not yet found a simple and unique means thereto; or else, having found
it, in budding, she has cast it aside to adopt the diversity of organs, means, and
movements. There are none, even to those of our own specie which man may not criticize,
even though he prize them; he has criticized and his criticism has been to diversify
them still further, which simplifies a fated necessity in making it pleasanter. Morals
term this diversification "luxure."1 This
term is a pejorative which may be applied also to the exercise of our other senses.
All is but luxuria. Luxuria, the variety of foods, their cooking, their seasoning,
the culture of special garden plants; luxuria: the exercises of
1The Latin luxuria and French luxure have no exact
English equivalent; our "luxury," is the French luxe; the phrase "the
exercise of pleasant lusts" is perhaps as near as I can come to a definition
of luxure.öTranslator.
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the eye, decoration, the toilet, painting; luxuria, music; luxuria, the marvellous
exercises of the hand, so marvellous that direct hand work can be mimicked by a machine
but never equalled; luxuria, flowers, perfumes; luxuria, rapid voyages; luxuria,
the taste for landscape; luxuria, all art, science, civilization; luxuria, also the
diversity of human gestures, for the animal in his virtuous sobriety has but one
gesture for each sense, and that gesture unvarying; or if the gesture, as probable,
undergoes a change, it is but a slow, invisible change, and there is at the end but
one gesture. The animal is ignorant of diversity, of the accumulation of aptitudes;
man alone is "luxurieux," is libidinous.
There is a principle which I will call the individualism of species. Each specie
is an individual which profits as best it may, for its useful ends, by the instruments
which have devolved to it. A specie of hymenoptera feels itself obliged to protect
its eggs from new enemies, by digging holes in the ground; it makes use of the tools
which it has, without taking count of the fact that these tools have not been made
for excavation; it acts thus at pressure of necessity, as man climbs trees in a flood,
or gets onto the roof in case of fire. The need is independent of the organ; it precedes
it, and does not always create it. In the sexual act, need commands the gesture:
the animal adapts itself to positions which are strange to it, and very difficult.
Coupling is nearly always a grimace. One would say that nature has set the male organ
here, and the female there, and left to specific ingenuity the care of effecting
the junction.
It is, I think, permitted us to conclude from the medi-
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ocre fitness of animals to milieu, and of organs to acts, that it is not the milieu
which absolutely fashions, or the organs which absolutely govern, the acts. One then
feels oneself inclined to reaccept Bonald's definition of man, and even to find it
admirable, just, and strict: An intelligence served by organs. Not "obeyed,"
not always, but served, service implying imperfection, a discord between the order
and its fulfillment. But the phrase applies not to man only, and its spiritualistic
origin in no way diminishes its aphoristic value; it qualifies every animal. The
animal is a nervous centre, served by the different tools in which its branches terminate.
It commands, and the tools, good or bad ones, obey. If they were incapable of performing
their work, at least the essential parts of it, the animal would perish. There are
forms of parasitism which seem to be the consequence of a general renunciation of
organs; impotent to enter into direct relations with the outer world, unmanned by
the softness of the muscles, the nervous system brings the skiff it was piloting
into some harbour or other, and beaches it.
Fabre says, thinking particularly of insects: "The organ does not determine
the aptitude." And this most aptly confirms Bonald's manner of seeing. Thrown
in at the end of a chapter, with scarcely anything directly to justify it, this affirmation
but gains in value. It is the conclusion, not of a dissertation, but of a long sequence
of scientific observations. As for the facts that one can set inside it, they are
innumerable; one would group them under two heads: The animal serves himself as best
he can with the organs he possesses; he does not always make use of them. The flying
stag, the best
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armed of all our insects, is inoffensive; while the carabe, of peaceful appearance,
is a formidable beast of prey. Apropos of the pill in which the scarab shuts its
egg, the skill with which it is worked up and felled, in a dark hole by a stump armed
insect, Fabre says simply: "It gave me the idea of an elephant wanting to make
lace." But in what insect will we see perfect accord of work and organ? In the
bee? It would scarcely seem so. The bee uses for building, modelling, waxing, bottling
honey, exactly the same organs that her sisters, the ammophile, bembex, sphex, ant,
chalicodome, use for hollowing earth, excavating sand, making cellars, mud houses.
The libellule does nothing with the hooks which render the termite dangerous, and
she loafs, while her industrious brother, also nevroptera and nothing more, builds
Himalayas.
The mole cricket is so well organized for digging with her short powerful bow legs
that she could cut sandstone: she frequents only the soft soil of gardens. The antophore,
on the other hand, with no instruments save her mediocre mandibles, her velvet paws,
forces the cement which holds the stone walls together, and bores the hardened earth
of the slopes by the roadside.
Insects, like man, moreover, ask nothing better than to do nothing and to let their
tools sleep; the xylocope, that fine violet bumble bee, who ought to bore into wood,
a gallery twice a hand's length wherein to lay her eggs, if she finds a suitable
hole ready made, confines herself to the meagerest possible works of accommodation.
In sum, the insects who like the saw fly (tenthredes) use a precise instrument for
a precise job, are almost rare.
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Man's hand, to come back to this point, is useful to him because he is intelligent.
In itself the hand is nothing. Proof, in the monkeys and rodents who use their hands
only to climb trees, louse themselves, and crack nuts. Our five fingers! Really nothing
is more broadcast in nature, where they are only a sign of age: the saurians have
them, and are not a bit more clever thereby. It is without fingers, without hands,
without members that the larvæ of insects construct for themselves marvellous
mosaic shells, weave themselves tents in silk floss, exercise the trades of plasterer,
miner, and carpenter. But this hand of man, become the world's marvel, how inferior
to his genius, and how he has had to lengthen it, refine it, complicate it, in order
to obtain obedience to the increasingly precise orders of his intelligence. Has the
hand created machines? Man's intelligence immeasureably surpasses his organs, and
submerges them; it demands of them the impossible and the absurd: hence the railway,
the telegraph, the microscope and everything which multiplies the power of organs
which have become rudimentary in the face of the brains' exigence, the brain being
our master, who has demanded also of the sexual organs more than they were able to
give: it is to satisfy these orders that the bed of love has been scattered with
so many dreams and rose leaves.
It is difficult to make people understand that the eye sees, not because it is an
eye, but because it is situated at the tip of some filaments of nerve which are sensitive
to light. At the end of filaments sensitive to sound, the eye would hear. Doubtless
it is adapted to its function, as the ear is to hearing, but this function is an
effect,
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not a cause. Insects' eyes are very different from ours One has spoken of the experiments
of a German savant who wished to throw visual images on the brain without the eye's
intervention. This is suspicious, but not absurd: insects are gifted certainly with
the power to smell but one has never been able to discover the organ in any single
one of them; and, also, the role of the antennæ which seems very considerable
in their life, remains very obscure, since the removal of these appendices has not
always a measurable effect on their activity.1
Organs, evidently the most useful, are sometimes placed in a position which diminishes
their value. Notice a resting horse, and another horse coming toward him (observation
can be made quite easily in the streets of Paris), what is he to do to gauge the
danger, and reconnoitre the movement? Look at the other horse? No His eyes are made
to look sideways, not forward. He uses his long ears, raises them, shifts their open
side toward the noise. Reassured he lets them fall, and reestablishes his calm. The
horse looks with his ears. The blinkers by which people pretend to make him look
forward, merely blind him, and perhaps, thereby diminish his impressionability. Blind
horses moreover do the same work as the others.
The senses, as one knows, are substitutable one for the other, in a certain degree;
but in the normal state they seem rather to reinforce each other mutually, and lend
each other a certain support. One does not shut the eyes to hear better, save when
one has determined the
1Fabre's experiments on mason bees, the shaggy ammophile
and great peacock moth.
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source of the sound. And even then, is it to hear better? Is it not rather to reflect
and to hear at the same time, to manage an interior concentration with which the
eye, essentially an explorative organ, would interfere?
It is in love that this alliance of all the senses is most intimately exercised.
In superior animals, as well as in man, each sense, together or in groups, comes
to reinforce the genital sense. None remain inactive, eye, ear, scent, touch, even
taste come into play. Thus one explains the gleam of plumage, the dance, song, sexual
odours. The female eye, in birds, is more sensitive than the male eye; the contrary
is true of humanity; but female birds and women are particularly moved by song or
words. The two sexes in dogs have, equally, recourse to scent; sight seems to play
but an insignificant role in their sexual access, since minuscule canine beasts do
not fear to address themselves to monsters, which for man would be in proportion
more than that of a mammoth. Insects before mating often caress each other with their
mysterious antennæ; the male is sometimes given a sounding apparatus: cricket
and grasshopper drum to charm their companions.
It is not necessary to explain how in humans, especially in the male, all the senses
concur in the amour, at least when moral and religious prejudices do not stop their
impetus. It should be so, in an animal so sensitive, and of so complex and multiple
a sensibility. The abstention of a single sense from the coupling is enough to enfeeble
the pleasure very greatly. The coldness of many women may proceed less from a diminution
of their genital sense, than from the general mediocrity of their senses.
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Intelligence, being but the ripe fruit of the general sensibility, its intensity
is very often found to be in a certain relation with the sexual sensibility. Absolute
coldness might signify stupidity. There are, however, too many exceptions for one
to generalize in this matter. It happens indeed that intelligence instead of being
the sum total of the sensibility, is, so to speak, the deviation or transmutation.
There remains very little sensibility; it is nearly all turned into intelligence.
Every organized animal has a master: its nervous system; and there is, doubtless,
no real life save where a nervous system exists, be it the magnificent infinitely
branching tree of mammals and birds, be it the double, knotted cord of the mollusks,
or the nail head which is planted, in ascides, between the buccal and anal orifice.
As soon as this new matter appears, it reigns despotically, and the unforeseen appears
in the world. One would say a conqueror, or rather an intruder, a parasite come in
by stealth, and lifting itself into the royal role.
Animals bear this tyranny better than man. Their master asks fewer things. Often
it only asks one: to create a being in its exact likeness. The animal is sane, that
is to say, ruled; man is mad, that is to say, out of rule: he has so many orders
to execute at once, that he scarcely does any one well. In civilized countries he
can hardly reproduce himself and the specie is in danger. It would disappear, if
the means of protecting it did not compensate the sterility.
One can not say that humanity has attained its intellectual limits, although its
physical evolution seems completed; but as superior human specimens are nearly
204
always sterile, or capable of only mediocre posterity, it is found that, alone among
values, intelligence is not transmitted by generation. Then the circle closes and
the same effort ends ceaselessly in the same recommencement. However, even here,
artificial means intervene, and the transmission of the acquisitions of intelligence
is relatively assured by all sorts of instruments. This mechanism, much inferior
to carnal generation, permits us, if the most exquisite forms of intelligence disappear
as fast as they flower, to preserve at least part of their contents. Notions are
transmitted, that is a result, even though most of them are vain, in default of sensibilities
sufficiently powerful to assimilate them and make a real life of them.
Finally, if man ought to abdicate, which seems unlikely, animality is rich enough
to raise up an inheritor. The candidates for humanity are in great number, and they
are not those whom the crowd supposes. Who knows if our descendants may not some
day find themselves faced with a rival, strong and in the flower of youth. Creation
has not gone on strike, since man appeared: since making this monster, nature has
continued her work: the human hazard might reproduce itself on the morrow.
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TRANSLATOR'S POSTSCRIPT
"Il y aurait peut être une certain corrélation entre la copulation
complete et profonde et le développement cérébral."
NOT only is this suggestion, made by our author at the end of his eighth chapter,
both possible and probable, but it is more than likely that the brain itself, is,
in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense
or reserve; at first over the cervical ganglion, or, earlier or in other species,
held in several clots over the scattered chief nerve centres; and augmenting in varying
speeds and quantities into medulla oblongata, cerebellum and cerebrum. This hypothesis
would perhaps explain a certain number of as yet uncorrelated phenomena both psychological
and physiological. It would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker
or presenter of images. Species would have developed in accordance with, or their
development would have been affected by, the relative discharge and retention of
the fluid; this proportion being both a matter of quantity and of quality, some animals
profiting hardly at all by the alluvial Nile flood; the baboon retaining nothing;
men apparently stupefying themselves in some cases by excess, and in other cases
discharging apparently only a surplus at high pressure; the gateux, or the genius,
the "strong minded."
I offer an idea rather than an argument, yet if we con-
206
sider that the power of the spermatozoide is precisely the power of exteriorizing
a form; and if we consider the lack of any other known substance in nature capable
of growing into brain, we are left with only one surprise, or rather one conclusion,
namely, in face of the smallness of the average brain's activity, we must conclude
that the spermatozoic substance must have greatly atrophied in its change from lactic
to coagulated and hereditarily coagulated condition. Given, that is, two great seas
of this fluid, mutually magnetized, the wonder is, or at least the first wonder is,
that human thought is so inactive.
Chemical research may have something to say on the subject, if it be directed to
comparison of brain and spermatophore in the nautilus, to the viscous binding of
the bee's fecundative liquid. I offer only reflections, perhaps a few data. Indications
of earlier adumbrations of an idea which really surprises no one, but seems as if
it might have been Iying on the study table of any physician or philosopher.
There are traces of it in the symbolism of phallic religions, man really the phallus
or spermatozoide charging, head on, the female chaos. Integration of the male in
the male organ. Even oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive
vulva of London, a sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation.
Without any digression on feminism, taking merely the division Gourmont has given
(Aristotelian, if you like), one offers woman as the accumulation of hereditary aptitudes,
better than man in the "useful gestures," the perfections; but to man,
given what we have of history, the "inventions," the new gestures, the
extrava-
207
gance, the wild shots, the impractical, merely because in him occurs the new up jut,
the new bathing of the cerebral tissues in the residuum, in la mousse of the life
sap.
Or, as I am certainly neither writing an anti feminist tract, nor claiming disproportionate
privilege for the spermatozoide, for the sake of symmetry ascribe a cognate role
to the ovule, though I can hardly be expected to introspect it. A flood is as bad
as a famine; the ovular bath could still account for the refreshment of the female
mind, and the recharging, regracing of its "traditional aptitudes; " where
one woman appears to benefit by an alluvial clarifying, ten dozen appear to be swamped.
Postulating that the cerebral fluid tried all sorts of experiments, and, striking
matter, forced it into all sorts of forms, by gushes; we have admittedly in insect
life a female predominance; in bird, mammal and human, at least an increasing male
prominence. And these four important branches of "the fan" may be differentiated
according to their apparent chief desire, or source of choosing their species.
Insect, utility; bird, flight; mammal, muscular splendour; man, experiment.
The insect representing the female, and utility; the need of heat being present,
the insect chooses to solve the problem by hibernation, i.e., a sort of negation
of action. The bird wanting continuous freedom, feathers itself. Desire for decoration
appears in all the branches, man exteriorizing it most. The bat's secret appears
to be that he is not the bird mammal, but the mammal insect: economy of tissue, hibernation.
The female prin-
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ciple being not only utility, but extreme economy, woman, falling by this division
into a male branch, is the least female of females, and at this point one escapes
from a journalistic sex-squabble into the opposition of two principles, utility and
a sort of venturesomeness.
In its subservience to the money fetish our age returns to the darkness of mediævalism.
Two osmies may make superfluous egg less nests, but do not kill each other in contesting
which shall deposit the supererogatory honey therein. It is perhaps no more foolish
to go at a hermit's bidding to recover an old sepulchre than to make new sepulchres
at the bidding of finance.
In his growing subservience to, and adoration of, and entanglement in machines, in
utility, man rounds the circle almost into insect life, the absence of flesh; and
may have need even of horned gods to save him, or at least of a form of thought which
permits them.
Take it that usual thought is a sort of shaking or shifting of a fluid in the viscous
cells of the brain; one has seen electricity stripping the particles of silver from
a plated knife in a chemical bath, with order and celerity, and gathering them on
the other pole of a magnet. Take it as materially as you like. There is a sort of
spirit level in the ear, giving us our sense of balance. And dreams? Do they not
happen precisely at the moments when one has tipped the head; are they not, with
their incoherent mixing of known and familiar images, like the pouring of a complicated
honeycomb tilted from its perpendicular? Does not this give precisely the needed
mixture of familiar forms in non sequence, the jumble of fragments each coherent
within its own limit?
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And from the popular speech, is not the sensible man called "level headed,"
has he not his "head well screwed on" or "screwed on straight;"
and are not lunatics and cranks often recognizable from some peculiar carriage or
tilt of the head piece; and is not the thinker always pictured with his head bowed
into his hand, yes, but level so far as left to right is concerned? The upward jaw,
head back pose has long been explained by the relative positions of the medulla and
the more human parts of the brain; this need not be dragged in here; nor do I mean
to assert that you can cure a lunatic merely by holding his head level.
Thought is a chemical process, the most interesting of all transfusions in liquid
solution. The mind is an up spurt of sperm, no, let me alter that; trying to watch
the process: the sperm, the form creator, the substance which compels the ovule to
evolve in a given pattern, one microscopic, minuscule particle, entering the "castle"
of the ovule.
"Thought is a vegetable" says a modern hermetic, whom I have often contradicted,
but whom I do not wish to contradict at this point. Thought is a "chemical process"
in relation to the organ, the brain; creative thought is an act like fecundation,
like the male cast of the human seed, but given that cast, that ejaculation, I am
perfectly willing to grant that the thought once born, separated, in regard to itself,
not in relation to the brain that begat it, does lead an independent life much like
a member of the vegetable kingdom, blowing seeds, ideas from the paradisal garden
at the summit of Dante's Mount Purgatory, capable of lodging and sprouting
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where they fall. And Gourmont has the phrase "fecundating a generation of bodies
as genius fecundates a generation of minds."
Man is the sum of the animals, the sum of their instincts, as Gourmont has repeated
in the course of his book. Given, first a few, then as we get to our own condition,
a mass of these spermatozoic particles withheld, in suspense, waiting in the organ
that has been built up through ages by a myriad similar wailings.
Each of these particles is, we need not say, conscious of form, but has by all counts
a capacity for formal expression: is not thought precisely a form comparing and form
combining?
That is to say we have the hair thinning "abstract thought" and we have
the concrete thought of women, of artists, of musicians, the mockedly "long
haired," who have made everything in the world. We have the form making and
the form destroying "thought," only the first of which is really satisfactory.
I don't wish to be invidious, it is perfectly possible to consider the "abstract"
thought, reason, etc., as the comparison, regimentation, and least common denominator
of a multitude of images, but in the end each of the images is a little spoiled thereby,
no one of them is the Apollo, and the makers of this kind of thought have been called
dry as dust since the beginning of history. The regiment is less interesting as a
whole than any individual in it. And, as we are being extremely material and physical
and animal, in the wake of our author, we will leave old wives' gibes about the profusion
of hair, and its chance possible indication
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or sanction of a possible neighbouring health beneath the skull.
Creative thought has manifested itself in images, in music, which is to sound what
the concrete image is to sight. And the thought of genius, even of the mathematical
genius, the mathematical prodigy, is really the same sort of thing, it is a sudden
out spurt of mind which takes the form demanded by the problem; which creates the
answer, and baffles the man counting on the abacus.
I query the remarks about the sphex in Chapter XIX, "que le sphex s'est formé
lentement," I query this with a conviction for which anyone is at liberty to
call me lunatic, and for which I offer no better ground than simple introspection.
I believe, and on no better ground than that of a sudden emotion, that the change
of species is not a slow matter, managed by cross breeding, of nature's leporides
and bardots, I believe that the species changes as suddenly as a man makes a song
or a poem, or as suddenly as he starts making them, more suddenly than he can cut
a statue in stone, at most as slowly as a locust or long tailed Sirmione false mosquito
emerges from its outgrown skin. It is not even proved that man is at the end of his
physical changes. Say that the diversification of species has passed its most sensational
phases, say that it had once a great stimulus from the rapidity of the earth's cooling,
if one accepts the geologists' interpretation of that thermometric cyclone.
The cooling planet contracts, it is as if one had some mud in a tin pall, and forced
down the lid with such pressure that the can sprung a dozen leaks, or it is as if
one had the mud in a linen bag and squeezed; merely as
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mechanics (not counting that one has all the known and unknown chemical elements
cooling simultaneously), but merely as mechanics this contraction gives energy enough
to squeeze vegetation through the pores of the imaginary linen and to detach certain
particles, leaving them still a momentum. A body should cool with decreasing speed
in measure as it approaches the temperature of its surroundings; however, the earth
is still, I think, supposed to be warmer than the surrounding unknown, and is presumably
still cooling, or at any rate it is not proved that man is at the end of his physical
changes. I return to horned gods and the halo in a few paragraphs. It is not proved
that even the sort of impetus provided by a shrinking of planetary surface is denied
one.
What is known is that man's great divergence has been in the making of detached,
resumable tools.
That is to say, if an insect carries a saw, it carries it all the time. The "next
step," as in the case of the male organ of the nautilus, is to grow a tool and
detach it.
Man's first inventions are fire and the club, that is to say he detaches his digestion,
he finds a means to get heat without releasing the calories of the log by internal
combustion inside his own stomach. The invention of the first tool turned his mind
(using this term in the full sense); turned, let us say, his "brain" from
his own body. No need for greater antennæ, a fifth arm, etc., except, after
a lapse, as a tour de force, to show that he is still lord of his body.
That is to say the langouste's long feelers, all sorts of extravagances in nature
may be taken as the result of a
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single gush of thought. A single out push of a demand, made by a spermatic sea of
sufficient energy to cast such a form. To cast it as one electric pole will cast
a spark to another. To exteriorize. Sometimes to act in this with more enthusiasm
than caution.
Let us say quite simply that light is a projection from the luminous fluid, from
the energy that is in the brain, down along the nerve cords which receive certain
vibrations in the eye. Let us suppose man capable of exteriorizing a new organ, horn,
halo, Eye of Horus. Given a brain of this power, comes the question, what organ,
and to what purpose?
Turning to folk lore, we have Frazer on horned gods, we have Egyptian statues, generally
supposed to be "symbols," of cat headed and ibis headed gods. Now in a
primitive community, a man, a volontaire, might risk it. He might want prestige,
authority, want them enough to grow horns and claim a divine heritage, or to grow
a cat head; Greek philosophy would have smiled at him, would have deprecated his
ostentation. With primitive man he would have risked a good deal, he would have been
deified, or crucified, or possibly both. Today he would be caught for a circus.
One does not assert that cat headed gods appeared in Egypt after the third dynasty;
the country had a long memory and such a phenomenon would have made some stir in
the valley. The horned god would appear to have persisted, and the immensely high
head of the Chinese contemplative as shown in art and the China images is another
stray grain of tradition.
But man goes on making new faculties, or forgetting
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old ones. That is to say you have all sorts of aptitudes developed without external
change, which in an earlier biological state would possibly have found carnal expression.
You have every exploited "hyper æsthesia," i.e., every new form of
genius, from the faculty of hearing four parts in a fugue perfectly, to the ear for
money (vice Henry James in "The Ivory Tower" the passages on Mr. Gaw).
Here I only amplify what Gourmont has indicated in Chapter XX. You have the visualizing
sense, the "stretch" of imagination, the mystics,öfor what there is to
themöSanta Theresa who "saw" the microcosmos, hell, heaven, purgatory complete,
"the size of a walnut;" and you have Mr. W., a wool broker in London, who
suddenly at 3 a. m. visualizes the whole of his letter file, three hundred folios;
he sees and reads particularly the letter at folder 171, but he sees simultaneously
the entire contents of the file, the whole thing about the size of two lumps of domino
sugar laid flat side to flat side.
Remains precisely the question: man feeling this protean capacity to grow a new organ:
what organ? Or new faculty; what faculty?
His first renunciation, flight, he has regained, almost as if the renunciation, so
recent in terms of biology, had been committed in foresight. Instinct conserves only
the "useful" gestures. Air provides little nourishment, and anyhow the
first great pleasure surrendered, the simple ambition to mount the air has been regained
and regratified. Water was never surrendered, man with subaqueous yearnings is still,
given a knife, the shark's vanquisher.
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The new faculty? Without then the ostentation of an organ. Will? The hypnotist has
shown the vanity and Blake the inutility of willing trifles, and black magic its
futility. The telepathic faculty? In the first place is it new? Have not travellers
always told cock and bull stories about its existence in savage Africa? Is it not
a faculty that man has given up, if not as useless, at any rate as of a very limited
use, a distraction, more bother than it is worth? Lacking a localizing sense, the
savage knowing, if he does, what happens "somewhere" else, but never knowing
quite where. The faculty was perhaps not worth the damage it does to concentration
of mind on some useful subject. "Instinct preserves the useful gestures."
Take it that what man wants is a capacity for clearer understanding, or for physical
refreshment and vigour, are not these precisely the faculties he is forever hammering
at, perhaps stupidly? Muscularly he goes slowly, athletic records being constantly
worn down by millimetres and seconds.
I appear to have thrown down bits of my note somewhat at random; let me return to
physiology. People were long ignorant of the circulation of the blood; that known,
they appeared to think the nerves stationary; Gourmont speaks of "circulation
nerveuse," but many people still consider the nerve as at most a telegraph wire,
simply because it does not bleed visibly when cut. The current is "interrupted."
The school books of twenty years ago were rather vague about Iymph, and various glands
still baffle physicians. I have not seen the suggestion that some of them may serve
rather as fuses
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in an electric system, to prevent short circuits, or in some variant or allotropic
form. The spermatozoide is, I take it, regarded as a sort of quintessence; the brain
is also a quintessence, or at least "in rapport with" all parts of the
body; the single spermatozoide demands simply that the ovule shall construct a human
being, the suspended spermatozoide (if my wild shot rings the target bell) is ready
to dispense with, in the literal sense, incarnation, enfleshment. Shall we postulate
the mass of spermatozoides, first accumulated in suspense, then specialized?
Three channels, hell, purgatory, heaven, if one wants to follow yet another terminology:
digestive excretion, incarnation, freedom in the imagination, i.e., cast into an
exterior formlessness, or into form material, or merely imaginative visually or perhaps
musically or perhaps fixed in some other sensuous dimension, even of taste or odour
(there have been perhaps creative cooks and perfumers?).
The dead laborious compilation and comparison of other men's dead images, all this
is mere labour, not the spermatozoic act of the brain.
Woman, the conservator, the inheritor of past gestures, clever, practical, as Gourmont
says, not inventive, always the best disciple of any inventor, has been always the
enemy of the dead or laborious form of compilation, abstraction.
Not considering the process ended; taking the individual genius as the man in whom
the new access, the new superfluity of spermatozoic pressure (quantitative and qualitative)
up shoots into the brain, alluvial Nile
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flood, bringing new crops, new invention. And as Gourmont says, there is only reasoning
where there is initial error, i.e., weakness of the spurt, wandering search.
In no case can it be a question of mere animal quantity of sperm. You have the man
who wears himself out and weakens his brain, echo of the orang, obviously not the
talented sieve; you have the contrasted case in the type of man who really can not
work until he has relieved the pressure on his spermatic canals.
This is a question of physiology, it is not a question of morals and sociology. Given
the spermatozoic thought, the two great seas of fecundative matter, the brain lobes,
mutually magnetized, luminous in their own knowledge of their being; whether they
may be expected to seek exterior "luxuria," or whether they are going to
repeat Augustine hymns, is not in my jurisdiction. An exterior paradise might not
allure them "La bêtise humaine est la seule chose qui donne une idée
de l'infini," says Renan, and Gourmont has quoted him, and all flesh is grass,
a superior grass.
It remains that man has for centuries nibbled at this idea of connection, intimate
connection between his sperm and his cerebration, the ascetic has tried to withhold
all his sperm, the lure, the ignis fatuus perhaps, of wanting to super think; the
dope fiend has tried opium and every inferior to Bacchus, to get an extra kick out
of the organ, the mystics have sought the gleam in the tavern, Helen of Tyre, priestesses
in the temple of Venus, in Indian temples, stray priestesses in the streets, un uprootable
custom, and probably with a basis of sanity. A sense of balance might show that asceticism
means either a
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drought or a crowding. The liquid solution must be kept at right consistency; one
would say the due proportion of liquid to viscous particles, a good circulation;
the actual quality of the sieve or separator, counting perhaps most of all; the balance
of ejector and retentive media.
Perhaps the clue is in Propertius after all:
Ingenium nobis ipsa puella fecit.
There is the whole of the XIIth century love cult, and Dante's metaphysics a little
to one side, and Gourmont's Latin Mystique; and for image making both Fenollosa on
"The Chinese Written Character," and the paragraphs in "Le Problème
du Style." At any rate the quarrel between cerebralist and viveur and ignorantist
ends, if the brain is thus conceived not as a separate and desiccated organ, but
as the very fluid of life itself.
June 21, 1921.
EZRA POUND