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THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY

OF LOVE

BY

REMY DE GOURMONT

Translated with a Postscript By

EZRA POUND

BONI AND LIVERIGHT

Publishers

New York

1922

CONTENTS

      I. The Subject of an Idea

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

      II. The Aim of Life

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

      III. Scale of Sexes

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

      IV. Sexual Dimorphism

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

      V. Sexual Dimorphism

      2. Vertebrates:--Unnoticeable in fish, saurians, reptiles.
      --The bird world.--Dimorphism favourable  to males: the
      oriole, pheasants, the ruff.--Peacocks and turkey-cocks.
      --Birds of paradise.--Moderate dimorphism of mammifers.
      --Effects of castration on dimorphism.

      VI. Sexual Dimorphism

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

      VII. Sexual Dimorphism and Feminism

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

      VIII. Love-Organs

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

      IX. The Mechanism of Love

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

      X. The Mechanism of Love

      2. Copulation (Continued)--Arthropodes.--Scorpions.--Large
      aquatic crustaceans.--Small crustaceans.--The hydrachne.
      --Scutilary.--Cockchafer.--Butterflies.--Flies, etc.--Variation
      of animals' sexual habits.

      XI. The Mechanism of Love p. 98

      3. Of birds and fish.--Males without penis.--Coupling by simple
      contact.--Salacity of birds.--Copulation  of batrachians:
      accoucheur toad, aquatic toad, earth  toad, pipa toad.--Fœtal
      parasitism.--Chastity of fish.--Sexes separated in love.
      --Onanistic fecundation.--Cephalopodes, the spermatophore.

      XII, The Mechanism of Love

      4. Hermaphrodism.--Sexual life of oysters.--Gasteropodes.
      --The idea of reproduction and the idea of pleasure.--Mechanism
      of reciprocal reproduction: helices.--Spintrian habits.
      --Reflection on hermaphrodism.

      XIII. The Mechanism of Love

      5. 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).--Dragonflies (demoiselle)
      virgins and "jouvencelle."--Picture of their love affairs.

      XIV. The Mechanism of Love

      6. 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 on the
      cannibalism of sex.--Loves of the praying mantis.

      XV. The Sexual Parade

      Universality of the caress, of amorous preludes.--Their rôle
      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.

      XVI. Polygamy

      Rarity of monogamy.--Taste for change in animals.--Rôles
      of monogamy and polygamy in the stability or instability
      of specific types.--Strife of the couple against polygamy.
      --Couples among insects.--Among fish, batrachians, saurians.
      --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 tempera the couple among civilized races.

      XVII. Love among 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.

      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.

      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.

      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 rôle of the senses in love.--Man and
      animal under the tyranny of the nervous system.--Wear and tear
      of humanity compensated by² acquisitions.--Man's inheritors.

      Translator's Postscript

      Bibliography: Practical Works Consulted

      THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE

CHAPTER I

THE SUBJECT OF AN IDEA

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

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

Certain moralists have, undeniably, pretended to talk about "love in
relation to natural causes," but they were profoundly ignorant of
these natural causes: thus Sénancour, whose book, blotted though it be
with ideology, remains the boldest work on a subject so essential that
nothing can drag it to triviality. If Sénancour had been acquainted
with the science of his time, if he had only read Réaumur and Bonnet,
Buffon and Lamarck; if he had been able to merge the two ideas, man and
animal into one, he, being a man without insurmountable prejudices,
might have produced a still readable book. The moment would have
been favorable. People were beginning to have some exact knowledge
of animals' habits. Bonnet had proved the startling relationships
of animal and vegetable reproduction; the essential principle of
physiology had been found; the science of life was brief enough to be
clear; one might have ventured a theory as to the psychological unity
of the animal series.

Such a work would have prevented numerous follies in the century then
beginning. One would have become accustomed to consider human love as
one form of numberless forms, and not perhaps, the most remarkable of
the lot, a form which clothes the universal instinct of reproduction;
and its apparent anomalies would have found a normal explanation amid
Nature's extravagance. Darwin arrived, inaugurated a useful system, but
his views were too systematized, his aim too explanatory and his scale
of creatures with man at the summit, as the culmination of universal
effort, is of a too theologic simplicity. Man is not the culmination
of nature, he is in Nature, he is one of the unities of life, that
is all. He is the product of a partial, not of total evolution; the
branch whereon he blossoms, parts like a thousand other branches
from a common trunk. Moreover, Darwin, truckling to the religiose
pudibundery of his race, has almost wholly neglected the actual facte
of sex; this makes his theory of sexual selection, as the principle
of change, incomprehensible. But even if he had taken account of the
real mechanism of love, his conclusions, possibly more logical, would
still have been inexact, foi if sexual selection has any aim it can be
but conservation Fecundation is the reintegration of differentiated
elements into a unique element, a perpetual return to the unity.

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

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

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

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

This is but one fact of a thousand. There is not one way of instinctive
man with a maid which is not findable in one or other animal species;
this is perfectly comprehensible seeing that man is an animal,
submitted to the essential instincts which govern all animality; there
being everywhere the same matter animate with the same desire: to live,
to perpetuate life. Man's superiority is in the immense diversity of
his aptitudes. Animals are confined to one series of gestures, always
the same ones, man varies his mimicry without limit; but the target is
the same, and the result is the same, copulation, fecundation and eggs.

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

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

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

CHAPTER II

THE AIM OF LIFE

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

What is life's aim? Its maintenance.

But the very idea of an aim is a human illusion. There is neither
beginning, nor middle, nor end in the series of causes. What is has
been caused by what was, and what will be has for cause the existent.
One can neither conceive a point of rest nor a point of beginning.
Born of life, life will beget life eternally. She should, and wants
to. Life is characterized on earth by the existence of individuals
grouped into species, that is to say having the power, a male being
united with a female, to reproduce a similar being. Whether it be the
internal conjoining of protozoaires, or hermaphrodite fecundation, or
the coupling of insects or mammifers, the act is the same: it is common
to all that lives, and this not only to animals but to plants, and
possibly even to such minerals as are limited by a non-varying form. Of
all possible acts, in the possibility that we can imagine, the sexual
act is, therefore, the most important of all acts. Without it life
comes to an end, and it is absurd to suppose its absence, for in that
case thought itself disappears.

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

Only in appearance does man escape this obligation of Nature. He
escapes as an individual, and he submits as a species. The abuse of
thought, religious prejudices, vices sterilize a part of humanity;
but this fraction is of merely sociological interest; be he chaste
or voluptuary, miserly or prodigal of his flesh, man is in his whole
condition subject to the sexual tyranny. All men do not reproduce their
species, neither do all animals; the feeble and the late-comers among
insects die in their robe of innocence, and many nests laboriously
filled by courageous mothers are devastated by pirates or by the
inclemency of the sky. Let the ascetic not come boasting that he has
freed his blood from the pressure of desire; the very importance which
he ascribes to his victory but affirms the same power of the life-will.
A young girl, before the slightest love affair, will, if she is
healthy, confess naively that she "wants to marry to have children."
This so simple formula is the legend of Nature. What an animal seeks
is not its own life but reproduction. Doubtless many animals seem,
during a relatively long existence, to have but brief sexual periods,
but one must make allowance for the period of gestation. In principle
the sole occupation of any creature is to renew, by the sex act,
the form wherewith it is clothed. To this end it eats, to this end
builds. This act is so clearly the aim, unique and definite that it
constitutes the entire life of a very great number of animals, which
are, notwithstanding, extremely complex.

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

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

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

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

SCALE OF SEXES

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

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

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

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

The first living organisms formed their hierarchies thus: individual
unicellular, or plastide; group of plastides or meride. The merides,
as the protozoaires, can reproduce themselves asexually, or by
division or budding. They may separate completely or remain attached
to their generator. If they remain attached one has mounted a step and
attained the zoide. Thence, by colonies of zoides one gets individuals
still more complex, called demes. None of these terms is much more
than a convenience for memory. The nomenclature stops, as does the
progression, at a certain moment, for the evolution has its limit, its
finality, as does even the milieu in which life continues to evolve.
One might say that heaving up from the obscure vital centre, the new
animal-shoots branch upward until they knock their heads upon an ideal
or imaginary roof which prevents any further climbing. This is the
death of the species, and Nature contemptuously abandoning her work,
begins to mate yet another mould of the initial ooze, to derive from
it a new form. The dream of an unlimited transformation of actual
species is pure chimæra; they will disappear one by one, according to
their order of primogeniture, according to their faculty for adapting
themselves to the changing milieu, and one might foresee, if the earth
lasts, in a distant time an unimaginable fauna replacing the present
fauna, and even replacing man.

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

In regard to the life-transmitting mechanism the animals are
divided somewhat differently. On one side budding and division, or
scissiparity, is prolonged rather far into the metazoaire series
concurrent with sexual reproduction; on the other hand there are, among
protozoaires, phenomena of coupling, unions of cellules which resemble
veritable fecundation and perform its rôle; without the nuclear
regeneration which is the aim and consequence, neither segmentation
nor budding can take place, at least not indefinitely. In sum, the
reproduction of beings is always sexual; only in the one case, the
protozoaires, it is produced by non-differentiated elements; and in
the other, the metazoaires, by differentiated elements, a male and a
female. If one clips off bits of a sponge, a hydra, one obtains as many
new individuals, which when they have grown one may again divide, and
so on repeatedly, but not indefinitely. At a variable instant, after
a certain number of generations by fragmentation, senescence appears
among the so produced individuals; the clipped morsels remain inert.
Thus this sort of artificial virgin birth has a limit, as has normal
parthenogenesis, and in order that the individuals may regain their
parthenogenetic force one must give them time to regenerate their
cellules by the coupling which fecundates them.

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

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

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

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

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

One ought, at the end of this summary chapter, to be courageous enough
to say that fecundation, as vulgarly understood, is merely an illusion.
Taking man and woman (or no matter what dioic metazoaire) the man
does not fecundate the woman; what happens is at once more mysterious
and more simple. From the male A, the great Male, and from the great
Female B are born without any fecundation whatever, spontaneously,
little males a and little females 6. These little males are called
spermatozoides, and the little females, ovules; it is between these new
creatures, between these spores, that the fecundating union occurs. One
then observes that _a_ and _b_ resolve themselves into a third animal
_x_, which by natural growth becomes either A or B. Then the cycle
begins again. The union between A and B is merely a preparation; A and
B are nothing but channels carrying _a_ and _b_, carrying them often
far beyond themselves. Like the plant-lice or drones, the mammifers
called man are subject to alternate generation, one parthenogenesis
always separating the veritable conjunction of the differentiated
elements. Coupling is not fecundation; it is merely the mechanism; its
utility is merely in that it puts two parthenogenetic products into
relation. This relation occurs inside the female, or outside the female
(as in case of fishes); the milieu has an importance of fact, not of
principle.

CHAPTER IV

SEXUAL DIMORPHISM

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

I. Invertebrates.--At a moment fairly undecided in the general
evolution the male organ specializes into the male individual.
Religious symbolisms may or might have been intended to mean this.
The female is primitive. At the third month, the human embryo has
external uro-genital organs clearly resembling the female organs. To
arrive at complete female estate they need undergo but a very slight
modification; to become male they have to undergo a considerable
and very complex transformation. The external genital organs of
the female are not, as has been often said, the product of an
arrested development; quite the contrary, the male organs undergo a
supplementary development, which is moreover useless, for the penis is
a luxury and a danger: the bird who does without it is no less wanton
thereby.

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

Side by side with males who are merely individualized sexual organs,
one sees males who have lost nearly all organs save the male organ
itself. Certain hermaphrodite cirripedes (mollusks attached by a
peduncle [stalk]) cling as parasites to the coat of other cirripedes:
whence a diminution of volume, a regression of ovaries, abolition of
nutritive functions; the stalk takes root in the living, nourishing
milieu. But one organ, the male one, persists in these diminished
cirripedes, and takes on enormous proportions, absorbing the whole
of the animal. With only a slight further change one would see the
transformation of male into male organ completely accomplished, as one
does, moreover, in the hydraria. Become again an integral part of an
organism from which it had formerly separated to become an individual,
the male merely returns, to its origins and clearly certifies what they
were.

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

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

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

There are exceptions, but found chiefly among parasites, among the
degraded, like the xenos which lives without distinction upon wasps,
coleoptera, and neuroptera. The male is provided with two large wings;
the female has neither wings, feet, eyes, nor antennæ; is a small worm.
After metamorphosis the male emerges, flies a little, then returns to
the female who has remained inside the nymphal envelope, and fecundates
her in her wrappings.

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

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

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

In many hymenoptera only the female carries the sword, as in the case
of the gilded wasp, gold-striped over blue or red, who can project a
long needle from her abdomen; the female philanthe, who is carnivorous,
while the puerile unarmed male lives upon flower-pollen. Not
disdaining this natural dessert, the female philanthe will attack the
nectar-loaded bee with her great dart, stab him and pump out his crop.
One may see the ferocious small animal knead the dead bee for half an
hour, squeeze him like a lemon, drink him out like a gourd. Charming
and candid habits of these winged topazes whirring among the flowers!
Fabre has excused this sadique gourmandizing: the philanthe kills bees
in order to feed her larvæ, who have, however, so great a repugnance
for honey that they die upon contact with it; it is therefore out of
sheer maternal devotion that she intoxicates herself with this poison!
All things are, in nature, possible. But it might not be unreasonable
to say that if the larvæ of the philanthe hate honey, it is because
their greatly honey-loving mother has never allowed them a drop of it.

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

Ants like all social hymenoptera are, as one knows, divided into three
sexes, winged males and females and wingless neuters. Fecundation takes
place in the air; the lovers fly up, join, fall enlocked, a golden
cloud which the death of the males disperses, while the females, losing
their wings, re-enter the house for egg-laying. The workers or neuters
are generally smaller, as noticeably in the great red wood-ants, who
dig their shelters in stumps. White ants or termites[1] show very
accentuated dimorphism; the female or queen having a head almost as
large as that of a bee, a belly the thickness of one's finger, long in
proportion, and growing to be fifteen times as large as the rest of
her body. This sexual tub lays continuously without any let-up at the
speed of an egg per second. The male, as in Baudelaire's vision of the
giantess, lives in the shadow of this formidable mountain of female
power and luxury. Among the termites there is not a fourth sex but a
fourth way of being sexless. There are soldiers as well as workers, the
soldiers having powerful mandibles mounted on enormous heads. All the
termite customs are extraordinary, and their conic nests reach a height
having a relation to them that a house five or six hundred metres high
would have to us.

Of mosquitoes and maringouin mosquitoes and all insects of that sort,
the females alone prick and suck the blood of mammifers. The males
live on flowers and tree-trunks. One sees them in forest alleys and
clearings, moving regularly as in army manœuvres, they are scouting,
watching for females; as soon as a male has caught one he seizes
her, and disappears up into the air where the union is accomplished.
Only the male cricket has a noise-machine, only the female a hearing
mechanism, situated in her front legs. Likewise it is the male
grasshopper who sounds. A love-call? People say so, but there is no
proof. Grasshoppers live, male and female in complete promiscuity
lined up on the tree-bark; such a quantity of music is unnecessary,
and moreover if the female grasshopper isn't deaf, she has an almost
insensible hearing. It is probable that the song of insects and birds,
if it is sometimes a love-call, is more often only a physiological
exercise, at once necessary and disinterested. Fabre, who lived all
his life among the implacable noises of the Provençal country-side,
sees in "the violin of the locust, in the bag-pipe of the tree-toad,
in the cymbals of the cacan only a means suitable to expressing the
joy of living, the universal joy which each animal species celebrates
in its own fashion."[2] Why then is the female mute? It is certainly
absurd and profoundly useless to summon, in almost uninterrupted song,
from morn till eve, a companion whom one sees seated beside one pumping
the juice out of a plane-tree; but it has perhaps not always been
so. The two sexes may have had, in the past, habits more divergent.
The plane-tree which unites them in the same feeding-ground has not
always grown in Provence. The unending song may have been useful
at a time when the sexes lived separate, and may have remained as
evidence of ancient customs. It is moreover a commonly observed fact
that activities long survive the period of their utility. Man and all
animals are full of maniac gestures whose movement is only explicable
on the hypothesis that it had once a different intention.

The female spider is nearly always superior to the male in size,
industry, activity, and means of defence and attack. We will note their
sexual habits later, but must observe here their particular cases of
dimorphism. The Madagascar she-epeire is enormous, very handsome,
black, red, silver and gold. She rigs up a formidable web in her tree,
near which one sees always a modest and puerile skein, the work of a
minuscule male keeping an anxious eye on the chance of sidling up to
his terrible mistress, and risking his wedding-death. The argyronete or
water-spider, returns the balance to the male, who is fatter, larger,
and provided with longer limbs.

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

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

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

[1] These are neuroptera or pseudo-neuroptera, but their habits bring
them noticeably near to social hymenoptera.

[2] Souvenirs entomologiques, tome V. p. 256.

CHAPTER V

SEXUAL DIMORPHISM

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

II. Vertebrates.--Sexual differences are generally unnoticeable
in fish, reptiles and saurians. They are accentuated when we come
to superior vertebrates, to birds and mammals, but without ever
attaining the extreme difference which characterizes a great number
of arthropodes. In birds the disparity may be of colouring, size, or
length, form and curliness of the feathers; among mammals, of shape,
hair, beard or horns. Sometimes the female bird is finer and stronger;
thus stronger and of more powerful wing-spread in the case of the
secretary, the buzzard, the falcon, the ash-coloured vulture and many
birds of prey; more beautiful as in the Indian tumices.[1] One of them,
the gray phalarope, solves woman's dream in favour of the female,
leaving her the brilliant colours; the male contents himself with more
sober clothing and, not being able to lay, assumes at least the further
maternal cares: sitting on the eggs.

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

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

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

The dimorphism of birds of paradise is even more marked than in the
preceding cases. Nape citron-yellow, throat green, forehead black, back
in burnt chestnut, the cock's tail has two long plumes, his flanks
two fine tapering feathers of yellow-orange marked in red, which he
can spread branching or draw in at will; the dim female is without
ornament. The sifilet, a bird related to the birds of paradise has,
fixed between eye and ear a pair of fine plumes twice the length of his
body, which float as he walks like white blue-shimmering streamers.
It is a lover's paraphernalia, which the female in consequence does
without, while the male loses his after mating.

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

The dimorphism of mammals is even less often favourable to the
female than is that of birds. One can cite but the sole example of
the American tapir where the male is smaller than the female.[2] The
contrary is nearly always the case. Sometimes the two sexes have an
identical appearance: cougars, cats, panthers, servals. If there is
a rule, it is difficult to formulate, for side by side with these
felines without sexual dimorphism, the sex of lions and tigers clearly
determines their forms.

Among mammifers there are bizarre resemblances and baroque differences.
The he and she mole, at first sight, appear the same even to their
exterior sexual organs, the female's clitoris is, like the male's
penis, perforated to let the ureter pass through it. But here, as we
shall see later, the morphologic resemblance by no means indicates
similarity of characters; the female mole is excessively female.
There is baroque difference of sexes in the capped seal of Greenland
and Terra Nova. The male can puff out his head-skin into an enormous
helmet. To what purpose? Possibly to scare naïve enemies. True to her
rôle of protégé the female can not throw this bluff, which is used by
Chinese warriors, by certain insects like the mantis and by the cobra
among serpents.

She-brown bears and she-kangaroos are smaller than males. In all the
deer tribes save reindeer the male alone is horned, and this is the
by no means ridiculous origin of a very old joke, for the does are
lascivious and are pleased to receive the attentions of a number of
males. The difference of bull and cow is distinct enough, that of
stallion and mare less so, diminishing still further between dog
and bitch, and being almost null among cats. In all cases where the
dimorphism is slight, and is the direct consequence of the possession
of sexual organs, castration inclines the male toward the female
type.[3] This is as apparent in cattle as in eunuchs or gelded horses.
One may see in this yet another proof of the primitivity of the female,
since the abstraction of testicles suffices to give the male that
softness of form and character which typifies females. Masculinity
is an augmentation, an aggravation of the normal type represented by
femininity; it is a progress, and in this sense it is a development.
But this reasoning, good for mammals, would be detestable among
insects, where the accentuation of type is nearly always furnished by
the female. There are no general laws in nature, unless they be those
which regulate all matter. With the birth of life, the unique tendency
diverges at once upon multiple lines. Perhaps we must throw this point
of divergence still further back, for a metal like radium seems to
differ from other metals as much as an hymenopter from a gasteropod.

[1] Bird, rather like quail.

[2] Translator's note. O sinistre continent.

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

CHAPTER VI

SEXUAL DIMORPHISM

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

III. Vertebrates (_continued_)--_Man and woman_.-- Among primates
sexual dimorphism is but little accentuated, especially when the male
and female live the same life in the open air and share the same
labours. The male gorilla, very strong and very pig-headed, flees from
no enemy; the female on the contrary is almost timid: when surprised
in company with the male, she cries out, gives the alarm and escapes.
But attacked when alone with her offspring, she resists. One can easily
distinguish the male and female orang-outang, the male is larger with
longer more bristling hair, he alone has a Horace Greeley beard; in the
female the patches of bald skin are much less callous. But the great
difference between the sexes in gorilla and orang-outang is in the
males having vocal sacks descending over the chest to the arm-pits.

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

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

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

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

Dimorphism is a constant fact in the animal series. Favourable to
the male, favourable to the female, indifferent, it starts always
from sexual necessity. There is a job to be done: nature divides it
equally, or not, between male and female. She knows neither justice
nor equality, and lays heavy burdens upon some, even to mutilation
and premature death, while she gives to others liberty, leisures, and
long hours of pleasant life. It is necessary that the couple reproduce
a certain number of beings, equals of the unities of which itself is
formed: all means are good which attain this end, and which attain
it most speedily and most surely. Nature who is pitiless, is also
in a hurry. Her imagination, always active, invents, ceaselessly,
new forms which she casts into life, in measure as the earlier born
finish their cycle. In superior mammals, and particularly in human
species, division of labour is the means used by nature to insure the
perpetuity of types. The female insect (leaving aside for the moment
social hymenoptera) is provided at once with the organs of her sex and
with tools of her trade, with arms for guarding the race; the female
human has ceded to man the tools and weapons, here merged in the one
instrument, muscle. Or rather, keeping her rights to the instrument,
she gives up the use of it. She is neither warrior, huntress, nor
mason, nor butcher; she is the female, and the male is the rest. The
division of labour supposes community. In order that the female may
cede the cares for subsistence and defence to the male, the couple
must be established and permanent. The male osmie (sort of solitary
bee) sees the light before his female; he could prepare the nest,
or at least choose its situation, guide the female to it, work or
watch; but he belongs to a series of animals in which the males are
merely male organs, and all his rôle is contained in the gestures of
mating. The couple is not yet formed. When it is formed, as in other
kinds of insects, scarabs, copris, sisyphs, geotrupes, the work is
equally shared between the two sexes. Here the parallel ends, for the
social evolution of the insect has led to functional differentiations
extremely complicated, and if not unknown, at least abnormal, to
humanity. Bee society has the female for base, human society has the
couple. They are organisms so different that no comparison of them is
possible, or even useful. Only in ignorance of them, can one envy bees;
a community without sexual relations is really without attraction for a
member of the human community. The hive is not a society but a hatchery.

The couple is only possible with a dimorphism, real but moderate.
There must be a difference, especially of strength, in order for
there to be a true union, that is to say subordination. A couple
formed of equal elements, like a society of equal elements, would be
in a state of permanent anarchy; two creatures suffice for anarchy,
as for war. A couple formed of elements too unequal, would, by the
crushing of the weaker, find itself reduced to tyrannized unity. Man
and woman, as is the case with other primates and the carnivora (for
most herbivora are polygamous) represent two sexes made to live united
and to share jointly in the cares for their offspring. The state of
couple, demanding a certain dimorphism, assures by it, its perpetuity.
When the couple is dissolved, be it by polygamy or by promiscuity,
as has happened among Mohammedans, and among Christians (a religion,
long powerful, functions both as race and as milieu) the dimorphism is
accentuated, each of the elements escapes, in some measure, the strict
influence of the other sex. Likewise if, in consequence of identical
education, the psychologic dimorphism is attenuated, even slightly--it
never is attenuated more than slightly--or if physical games reduce a
little the physical differences, the couple is less easily formed and
grows less stable: hence adultery, divorces, excess of prostitution.
In all monogamous society, prostitution is the strict consequence: it
diminishes more or less in polygamous societies where the free women
are rarer, it would only disappear completely in promiscuity, that is
to say in universal prostitution.

Polygamy, apart from its indirect influence, has, by the internment
of women, a direct one on the dimorphism. Set apart from the active
life of the outer world, and even from the air and light, the female
of the male polygamous human becomes whiter, whatever may have been
her initial colour, fatter, heavier, and also more stupid and more
addicted to all sorts of onanism. Among Indian Mussulmen the man and
woman appear to belong to different species, the man being so tanned,
and the woman so colourless. Shut-in prostitutes of the Occident also
lose colour, and one would with difficulty recognize two sisters in
the soft, bleached whore and the sun-reddened, hardy cow-girl. Woman's
liberty also accentuates the dimorphism but by another process. Freed
from the bridle of necessity, from the need of pleasing, woman escaped
from the couple, exaggerates her feminism, she becomes again the female
in excess, since it is in being more and more female that she has most
chances of seducing the male, who is insensible to all other merit.
And, inversely, a woman having man's education is, given equal beauty,
less than any other a seductress.

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

The sole aim of the couple is to free the female from all care that is
not purely sexual, to permit her the most perfect accomplishment of her
most important function. The couple favours the female, but it favours
also the race. It is fully beneficial when the woman has acquired the
right of maternal laziness. There is another reason for believing in
the legitimacy of such a sharing of useful work between the two members
of the couple, it is that masculine work diminishes its femininity,
while feminine work feminizes the males. In order that the necessary
and moderate dimorphism persist it would be necessary if the woman is
to take up male exercises that the male should assume all the accessory
labours of maternity. This would not be contrary to supple natural
logic; there are examples of it among batrachians and among birds. But
one does not see clearly either the utility or the possibility of such
a reversal of rôles in the human species. The duty of a being is to
persevere in its being and even to augment the characteristics which
specialize it. The duty of woman is to keep and to accentuate her
æsthetic and her psychologic dimorphism. The æsthetic viewpoint obliges
one for the thousandth time to put, but, happily, not to resolve the
agreeable question of woman's beauty. One may judge when it is a matter
of shape, of muscular energy, of respiratory amplitude: these can be
measured and set down in figures. When it comes to beauty, it is a
matter of feeling, that is to say of what is at once deepest and most
personal in each one of us, and which is most variable between one man
and another. However, the sexual element which enters into the idea
of beauty, being here at its very root, since it is the question of
woman, the opinion of men is nearly unanimous: in the human couple, it
is woman who represents beauty. All contrary opinion will be for ever
considered as a paradox or as the most boring of sexual aberrations. A
feeling does not adduce its reasons, it has none. It has to have them
lent to it. The superiority of feminine beauty is real, it has a sole
cause, the unity of line. What makes woman the more beautiful is the
invisibility of her genital organs. The male organ, which is sometimes
an advantage, is always a load, and always a blemish; it is made for
the race, not for the individual. In the male human, and precisely
because of its erect attitude, the sex is the sensitive point par
excellence, and the visible point, it is the point of attack in hand to
hand struggle, point of aim for the jet, obstacle for the eye, be it as
a roughness of surface, be it as a break in the middle of the line. The
harmony of the female body is then geometrically, much more perfect,
especially if one consider the male and the female at the very hour
of desire, at the moment, that is, when they present the most intense
and most natural expression of life. In the woman, all movements are
interior, or visible only in the undulation of her curves, conserving
thus her full æsthetic value, while the man, seeming at once to recede
toward the primitive states of animality, appears reduced, putting off
all beauty, to the bare and simple condition of genital organ. Man,
it is true, has his æsthetic compensation during pregnancy and its
deformations.

One must admit also that the human form has grave defects of
proportion, and that they are more accentuated in the female than in
the male. In general the trunk is too long, and the legs, consequently,
too short. One says that there are two æsthetic types in Aryan
races: one with long limbs and one with short limbs. Both types are
indeed, easy enough to distinguish, but they rarely present their
characteristics with sufficient distinction, moreover the first
is rather rare: it is the one which sculptors have vulgarized by
amelioration. Compare a series of photographs of art with a series of
photos from the nude, and you have proof enough that the beauty of the
human body is an ideologic creation. Take away the egoistic sentiment
of the race, and the sexual delirium, and man would appear very
inferior in harmonic plentitude to most of the mammifers; the monkey,
his brother, is, frankly, inæsthetic.

CHAPTER VII

SEXUAL DIMORPHISM AND FEMINISM

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

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

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

The male is an accident: the female would have sufficed. Brilliant as
are, in certain animal species, the destinies of the male, the female
is primordial. In civilized humanity she is born in proportion greater
as the civilization approaches a greater plenitude; and this very
plenitude diminishes, proportionately, the general fecundity: whether
we treat of man or of apple-trees, the male element in- or de-creases
according to famine or abundance of nourishment. But the human race is
not sufficiently plastic for the variation of births to be ever very
great between the two sexes; and no warm-blooded animal is sufficiently
plastic for this cause, so active among vegetables, ever to lead to
the dissolution of the male. There are no natural laws, there are
tendencies, there are limits: the fields of oscillation are determined
by the pasts of species, trenches curving into cloisters which close,
in nearly all directions, the alleys of the future.

It is a fact, from henceforth hereditary, that the male of the human
species has centralized in himself most of the activities independent
of the sexual motor. He alone is capable of disinterested works, that
is to say of aims unconnected with the physical conservation of the
race, but without which civilization would be impossible, or at least
very different from what it is and from the idea which we have of its
future. Doubtless in humanity, as in the rest of nature, the female
represents the important sex. In utter need, as with the mason bee, she
could serve for the absolutely necessary work, to build the shelter,
to gather the food, and the male might, without essential damage be
reduced to the rôle of mere fecundating apparatus. The number of males
could, and even should in such case, diminish with due rapidity, but
then human society would in- or decline toward the type represented
by that of social bees: continual labour being incompatible with
the periods of maternity, the feminine sex would atrophy, a single
female would be elevated to the dignity of queen and mother, the
rest of the population would work stupidly for an ideal exterior to
its own sensibility. Even more radical transformations would not be
anti-natural. Virgin-birth might establish itself: certain males could
be born in each century, as happens in the intellectual order, and they
could fecundate the generation of loins, as genius fecundates the
generation of minds. But humanity, by the richness of its intelligence,
is less than other animal species submitted to causal necessity; by
constant squirming in its nets, it has managed to displace a cord here
and there, and makes now and again the unexpected movement. The coming
of males once in a century would be unnecessary if some mechanical
device were found for exciting the life of woman's eggs, as one excites
those of the sea-anemone. If a few males were born from time to time, by
an atavistic quirk of nature, they could be exhibited as curiosities,
as we now exhibit hermaphrodites.

The feminist ideal leads us to these pipe-dreams. But if it comes
to destroying the couple and not to re-forming it, if it comes to
establishing a vast social promiscuity, if feminism resolves itself
into the formula: free-woman in free-love, it is even more chimerical
than all the chimzera which have at least their analogy in the
diversity of animal habits. Human parthenogenesis is less absurd: it
offers an order, and promiscuity is a disorder. But social promiscuity
is impossible by the further reason that woman, the more feeble,
would be crushed by it. She struggles against man only, thanks to the
privileges which man concedes her, when troubled by sexual inebriety,
intoxicated and drowsy with the fumes of desire. The factitious
equality which she claims would re-establish her ancient slavery, on
the day when most or all women wish to enjoy it: that is still another
possible solution of the feminist crisis. However one looks at it, one
sees the human couple re-establish itself ineluctably.

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

CHAPTER VIII

LOVE-ORGANS

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

Sexual dimorphism, physic as well as psychic, has evidently one sole
cause, sex; nevertheless the organs which differ least from male and
female among species which differ most, are precisely the sexual
organs. That is, they are rigorously made the one for the other, and
the accord in this case must be not only harmonic, but mechanical
and mathematical. They are cog-wheels which must bite one on the
other with exactitude, be it, as in birds, that there is but an
exact superposition of two orifices, be it, as in mammals that the
key must enter the keyhole. There is a dimorphism, but it is that of
the mould to the cast, of the scabbard to the blade; for the parts
where the contact is less strict, the parallelism is nevertheless
quite sensible and quite apparent. This similitude in difference
has struck philosophers as well as anatomists in all ages from the
logical insinuations of Aristotle to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's theory
of analogies. Galien had already noted certain analogies, more or less
exact: greater labia, and foreskin, ovaries and testicles, scrotum and
matrice. He says, textually: "All parts of man are found in woman;
there is but one point of difference, woman's parts are interior, man's
exterior, parting from the perineal region. Imagine those which first
present themselves to mind, no matter which, unfold woman's or fold
man's inward and you will find either a replica of the other. Suppose
first man's organs pushed into him and extending interiorly between the
rectum and the vessie; in this supposition the scrotum would occupy
the place of the matrice, with the testicles placed at each side of
the exterior orifice. The prong of the male would become the throat
of the cavity thus produced, and the skin of the prong's extremity,
called the foreskin would form the vagina. Suppose, inversely, that
the matrice should turn inside out and fall outside, would not its
testicles (ovaries) of necessity, find themselves inside its cavity and
would not it envelop them as a scrotum? Would not the throat, hidden up
to the perineum, become the male member, and the vagina, which is but
a cutaneous appendix of the throat, the foreskin?" This is the passage
which Diderot has transposed and put _au courant_ with science in his
_Rêve d'Alembert_. This page of literary anatomy retains its expressive
value: "Woman has all man's parts, the sole difference is like that
between a purse hanging outside and a purse stuffed inside; a female
foetus resembles a male foetus, so as to deceive anyone; the part which
occasions the error, sinks in the female foetus in measure as the purse
extends inward; it is never obliterated to the point of losing its
primitive form; it also is the mover of pleasure, it has its gland, its
foreskin, and one notes at its extremity a point which appears to have
been the orifice of a urinary canal which has closed; there is in man
from the anus to the scrotum, the interval called the perinæum, and
from the scrotum to the end of the prong, a seam which looks like the
resewing of a basted vulva; women with excessive clitoris, have beards,
eunuchs have not, their thighs increase, their hips widen, their knees
round out, and in losing the characteristic organization of one sex
they seem to return to the characteristic conformity of the other...."
In terms less literary, one considers as homologous, in man and woman,
the ovary and the testicle, lesser labia, clitoridian cap and sheath,
the hanging foreskin; the greater labia and the envelope of the
scrotum; clitoris and penis; the vagina and the prostatic utricle. One
will find the details of these analogies in special works, they can not
be given here with scientific precision. The sole point to hold on to
is that the two sexes not only in man, and not only in mammifers, but
in nearly all the animal and vegetable series, are but a repetition of
the same creature with specialization of function. This specialization
may extend to functions other than sexual, to work (bees, ants) to war
(termites). The soldier termite is extraordinary; he is not more so
than the male.

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

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

Man is a placentary mammifer: by this title his genital organs and
their mode of employ are common to him and to all hairy animals having
teats and an umbilicus. He is not normally covered all over with hair,
but there is hardly a spot on his body where hairs may not sprout,
and both sexes are hairy often with extreme abundance in pubis and
arm-pits. The male and active organ of mammifers is the penis, usually
completed exteriorily by the testicles. The penis is, at once, the
excreting _conductor_ of urine and sperm; an analogous relation exists
in the female, and it is with exactitude that these mingled organs
have been called genito-urinary or more recently, uro-genital; it is
the same in all the animal series, the urethra opens exteriorily or it
ends, as in birds, in a cloaca, vestibule, for all the excretions.

The penis of two-handed (bimanous) creatures descends freely, it hangs
before the pubis in quadrumanes, and in chiroptera (bats). The bat
is strangely like man, and like primates in general: five fingers
to the hand, one a thumb, five fingers on the foot, pectoral teats,
mensual flux, free penis; it is a little caricature of man, abrupt and
frightened in its evening flight about houses. Among flesh-eaters,
ruminants, pachyderms, solipedes and several other families of
mammals, the penis is sheathed in a scabbard which stretches along the
belly; thus preserved against accidents and insect stings, while its
sensibility is maintained intact. Voyagers, according to Buffon, have
seen Patagonians trying to get like results by tying the 'foreskin
above the gland, like a bag with a cord. Thus man's hand permits him
to improve or mutilate his body. Mutilation and sexual deformations,
circumcision among Semites and savages, excision of Russian illuminati,
transversal perforation of the gland, surgical flattening of the
prong, are very frequent. The hand of the chiroptera is shackled, that
of quadrumanes has only one sexual rôle, masturbation. It may also
serve as a shield against external danger; many quadrumanes, better
protected, make the same use of their tail when they curl it between
their legs, this is sometimes a psychological gesture, female modesty
or refusal, sometimes a gesture of preservation. The movements of
Venus modest, of man coming naked from his bath, have no other origin.
Monkeys when they stop moving about, place their hands on their sexual
parts. The Polynesians, before Christianity, had the custom when
standing upright, of holding their scrotum in both hands with the prong
hanging between the fingers: the posture of the wild dandy. Certain
species lack scrotum as Pliny had already remarked: _Testes elephanto
occulti_. In camels the testicles roll beneath the skin of the groin;
rats' testicles are internal, but emerge in the rutting season and
assume an enormous development. Apes often have the pouch-skin blue,
red or green, like the other bald parts of their bodies.

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

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

The penis is found in woman in the form of clitoris. This is almost as
voluminous as a true penis in quadrumanes; it is atrophied in other
species. It varies individually in women, certain of them being in
this respect quadrumanes. Sometimes the clitoris is pierced for the
passage of the urethra (certain apes and the mole); a slight trace of
this meatus is seen at the head of the woman's clitoris. In species
whose males possess a penial bone the female has often a clitoridian
bone; nothing more clearly affirms the parallelism of these two organs,
whereof one serves only for pleasure, after having been, perhaps in a
long distant era, when man romped among marine invertebrates, a real
instrument of fecundation. The greater labia, limiting the general
orifice of the vulva, exist only in woman and, less markedly, in the
female orang-outang. Circular in rodents, transversal in the unique
case of the hyena, a heteroclite animal, the vulva is longitudinal in
all other mammifers. Completely imperforate in the mole the vagina is
more or less closed by a membrane, which the male penis tears in first
encounter, in women, and several quadrumanes, certain small monkeys,
the marmoset, certain carnivora, the bear, hyena, white-bellied seal,
the daman (nailed); it is replaced in dog, cat, ruminants by an annular
gripping between the vagina and the vestibule. The maidenhead is,
therefore, not peculiar to human virgins, and there is no glory in a
privilege which one shares with the marmoset.

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

Other particularities and correspondences are examined in the next
chapter which deals with the mechanism of love, and the method used by
divers animals to make use of their organs according to the commandment
of nature. There remain for consideration the lesser mammals and other
vertebrates whose fecundatory instruments resemble those of mammifera.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Hermaphrodism: mollusks, tuniciers, worms.

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

One needs many discriminations and exceptions to make this table more
precise. It is however, not untrue, although incomplete and lacking
nuances, and it permits one to see: that the separation of sexes
by well characterized copulating apparatus is not a sign of animal
superiority, although it is found among the most gifted animals; that
birds with their genital system merely sketched in, seem to represent
a type elevated in nature by the simplicity of organs and it means:
that the sexes in animals who are without copulation either profound
or superficial, tend, as in fish, to remain without difference; that
all other modes of copulation are attributed exclusively to inferior
species; that hermaphrodism was but a trial limited to a category of
creatures lacking everything not exclusively designed for the process
of reproduction; that the absence of sex characterizes only the
earliest forms of life.

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

CHAPTER IX

THE MECHANISM OF LOVE

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

1. COPULATION: VERTEBRATES.--Forberg's "Figuræ Veneris" exhausts
in forty-eight illustrations the manners of coupling accessible
to the human species; the erotic manuals of India imagine certain
further variants and voluptuous perfectionings, but many of these
juxtapositions are unfavourable to fecundation, and a majority of
them have only been invented in order to escape too logical and too
material a result. Animals surely, the most liberated as well as the
most stupid, are ignorant of all modes of conjugal fraud; needless to
say no dissociation can be made in their rudimentary minds between
the sexual sensation and the maternal, between sexual and paternal
sensation, much less. The ingenuity of each specie is small, but the
universal ingenuity of total fauna is immense, and there are few human
imaginings among those which we term perverse and even monstrous which
are not the right and the norm in one or another region of animal
empire. Practices very analogous to (although very different in aim
from) divers onanist practices, to spermatophagia, even to sadism are
imposed on innocent beasts and represent for them familial virtue
and chastity. A physician, who has not obtained much glory thereby,
invented or proposed artificial fecundation: he was imitating spiders
and dragon-flies; M. de Sade liked to imagine ruttings where blood and
sperm flowed simultaneously; mere kindergarten manual (Berquinade) if
one contemplate, not without bewilderment, the habits of an ingenious
orthopter, the praying mantis, the insect which prays to God, la
prego-Diou as the Provençals call her, the prophetess as the Greek
said! Baudelaire's verses ridiculing those who wish

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

have a value not only moral but scientific. In love everything is just,
everything is noble, as soon as, among the maddest animals, it is a
play moved by the desire of creating. It is more difficult doubtless to
justify fantasies which are merely for the purpose of avoiding trouble,
especially if one allow oneself to be blinded by the idea of specific
finality; one may however affirm, and one will say nothing more about
the matter, that animals are not ignorant either of sodomy or of
onanism and that they cede to them by necessity, in the absence of
females. Sénancour has written wise and bold pages upon these practices
among humans.

Sexual ethnography hardly exists. The scattered data on this subject,
though extremely important, have not been co-ordinated. That would be
a small matter. They have not even been verified. One knows nothing of
coital practices save what life teaches one, questions of this sort
being difficult to ask, and answers being always equivocal. There is
here an entire science which has been corrupted by Christian prudery.
An order was issued long ago and is still obeyed; one has concealed
all that unites, sexually, man and animal, everything that proves
the unity of origin for all that lives and feels. Physicians who
have studied this question have known only the abnormal, the malady:
it would be imprudent to base conclusions on general practices from
their observations. The best source, at least for Europeans, is still
the casuist writings. From the enumeration of sins against chastity
gathered by professional confessors, one could, after some study,
deduce the secret sexual habits of civilized humanity. But one must
take care not to retain either the old idea of sin, or the idea of the
same under modern cloak, of fault, crime or error. Practices common to
an entire ethnic group can not be judged to be other than normal, it
matters little whether they have been stigmatized by the apologists of
right living. What is good is what is and what will continue to be. It
is known that bimanes and quadrumanes are very libertine, and that this
is in accord with their physical suppleness and their intelligence.
It is a fact undeniable and insurmountable, even if annoying. The
human couple has drawn from this tendency a thousand erotic fantasies,
which, in being disciplined have ended in the creation of a veritable
sexual method, be it disinterested pleasure, be it preservation
against fecundity; is this of no importance? How can one lecture about
depopulation if one lose sight of this primordial fact? What can
normal or patriotic reasoning do against an instinct which has become
or rebecome an intelligent and conscious practice, bound to what is
deepest in human sensibility? It is very difficult, especially when
dealing with man, to distinguish between normal and abnormal. What is
the normal; what the natural? Nature ignores this adjective, and one
has dragged out of her bosom many illusions, perhaps in irony, perhaps
in ignorance.

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

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

This mode, considered by Lucretius as the more favourable to
fecundation, is that of most mammifers, of nearly all insects and
of many animal families. Apes great and small know no other. The
architecture of their bodies would make face to face copulation very
difficult. One must not forget that their upright position is never
more than momentary, even in orangs and chimpanzees; they are not
much better equilibrated than bears, much less so than kangaroos,
marmosets[1] and squirrels; even when they stand up one feels that
they have four feet. Love among them is not free from the seasons,
and although they are libidinous all the year, they do not seem fit
for generation save through the weeks of their rutting time: then
their genital organs acquire a permanent rigidity; the udders of the
females, ordinarily as small as those of the males, only swell during
this period. There is, therefore, a vast difference, from the sexual
standpoint, between man and the great apes, his anatomic neighbours.
Man even in the humblest species has mastered love and made it his
daily slave, at the same time that he has varied the accomplishments
of his desire and made possible its renewal after brief interval. This
domestication of love is an intellectual work, due to the richness and
power of our nervous system, which is as capable of long silences as of
long physiological discourses, of action and of reflection. The brain
of man is an ingenious master which has managed, without possessing any
very evident superiority, to get out of the other organs work of the
most complicated sorts, and most finely-sharpened pleasures; its (the
brain's) mastery is very feeble in quadrumanes and other animals; it is
very strong in insects as will be explained in a following chapter.

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

    In triviis quum sæpe canes discedere aventes
    Diversi cupidine summis ex viribus tendunt.
                                         --LUCRETIUS.

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

Our other familiar animal, the cat, is not more happy in his
affections. His penis is indeed furnished with thorns, with homy
papilla toward the tip, and the intromission as well as the separation
is only accomplished with groans. What one hears at night are not
cries of voluptuousness but of suffering, the bowlings of a beast
whom nature has caught in the trap. This does not prevent the female
from being very enterprising; responding to the cries of the pursuing
male she excites him in a hundred ways, biting at neck and belly
with an insistence which has, they say, provided a metaphor in the
erotic vocabulary. Biting the neck is much more curious, as it is of
a much less direct intention. Bitches also bite the neck of the dog
in prelude. For near the neck is situated the bulb, original knot of
nerves governing the secret parts and the genital region.

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

One knows that a cat's tongue is rough: so is the tongue and all the
mucous surfaces of negroes. This roughness of surface notably augments
the genital pleasure, as men who have known negresses testify. It has
been perfected. The Dyaks of Borneo pierce the extremity of the penis,
through the navicular channel and fit into it a pin to both ends of
which are attached tufts of stiff hair in the form of a brush. Before
surrender the women by certain tricks and certain traditional gestures
indicate the length of the brush desired. In Java one replaces this
apparatus known as the ampallang, by a sheath of goat skin, more or
less thick. In other countries there are incrustations of little
pebbles, which give the gland the shape of an embossed mace; and these
pebbles are sometimes replaced by tiny bells, so that the men make in
running a sound like mules, and attentive women can judge their value
according to the intensity of their sexual music. These customs, noted
by de Paw among certain aborigines of America, have not been recently
observed, doubtless because the Christian modesty of modern travellers
has obliterated their eyes and ears at convenient moments. No custom
is abolished save in the face of some other custom more useful to
sensuality, and the imagination seems rather to advance than to recede
in these matters. It is true that the inventors hide themselves, even
in savage countries, sexual morality tending toward uniformity.

These artifices, which appear curious to us, have certainly been
created at the instigation of women, since theirs is the profit of
them. Males have submitted to them, happy no doubt to be delivered at
the price of passing pain from the terrible lasciviousness of their
females. Racked and flayed by such instruments the women ought, at
least for a few days, to flee the male and brood in silence upon
their luxurious memories. Chinese and Japs, whose women are likewise
lascivious, are familiar with analogous means; to dominate their
companions they have also invented ingenious onanist methods which
give them time to attend to their own affairs, while peace reigns
over their hearthstones. In the strange dissemblance between human
races the Aryans have, for the same purpose, made use of the religious
check-rein, of prayer, of the idea of sin, and finally of liberty, that
is to say of the pleasure of vanity which bewilders the woman, and
invites her to please someone else before satisfying herself.

Woman is not the only mammal for whom, apart from the peculiar form
of the penis, the first approaches are painful; but there is perhaps
no female who has better reason than the mole for fearing the male.
Her vulva, exteriorly unperforated, is covered by hide, downy as
that of the rest of her body; she must, to be fecundated, undergo
a veritable surgical operation. One knows how these beasts live,
burrowing in search of food, in long subterranean galleries, of which
the wastage, pushed up here and there forms the mole-ridge. In rutting
time, forgetting his hunting, the male starts in quest of a female; as
soon as he divines her, he starts digging in her direction, furiously
excavating the hostile earth. Feeling herself hunted, the female flees.
Hereditary instinct makes her tremble before the tool which shall
open her belly, before the redoubtable gimlet-armed penis which has
perforated her mother and all her female ancestors. She flees, digs,
as the male advances, cross-hatching tunnels in which her persecutor
may end by losing his way; but the male also is educated by heredity:
he does not follow the female but circles round her, heads her off,
ends by catching her in an impasse, and while she is still ramming her
blind muzzle into the earth, he grips, operates, fecundates. Charming
emblem of modesty, this small, soft, black-pelted beast. What human
virgin would show such constancy in the defence of her virtue? Who,
alone in the night, in a subterranean palace, would use her hands to
open the walls, all her strength to flee from her suitor? Philosophers
have believed that sexual modesty was an artificial sentiment, fruit
of civilizations: they did not know the mole's story, or any of the
true stories in nature, for nearly all females are timorous, nearly
all react, at the appearance of the male, in fear or in flight. Our
virtues are never more than psychological tendencies, and the finest
of them are those whose explanation we are forbidden to seek. Why is
the she-bat violent, the she-mole timorous? Without doubt the she-mole
observes the rule, even in exaggerating its severity, but why the rule?
There is no rule, there are nothing but facts which we group in modes
perceptible to our intelligence, facts which are always provisory, and
which a change of perspective can denaturize. The notion of a rule, the
notion of a law, confession of our impotence to pursue a fact into the
logical origins of its genealogy. The law is a fashion of speaking,
an abbreviation, a point of rest. The law is half the facts plus one.
Every law is at the mercy of an accident, an unexpected encounter;
and yet, without the idea of law all would be mere night in our
consciousness.

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

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

The female waits, or flees, which is but another way of waiting, the
active way; for not only _se cupit ante videnti_ but she desires to
be taken, she wishes to fulfill her destiny. It is doubtless for
this reason that, in species where the male is feeble or timid, the
female resigns herself to an aggression demanded by care for future
generations. In short, two forces are present, the magnet and the
needle. Usually the female is the magnet, sometimes she is the needle.
These are details of mechanism which do not modify the general march
of the machine to its goal. At the origin of all feeling there is a
fact irreducible and incomprehensible in itself. Common reasoning
starts from the feeling to explain the fact; this gives the absurd
result of making thought run in a set track, like a horse in a circus.
Kantian ignorantism is the masterpiece of these training exercises,
where, starting from the categoric stable the learned quadruped
necessarily thither returns, having jumped through all the paper disks
of scholastic reasoning. Observers of animal habits fall regularly
into the prejudice of attributing, regularly, to beasts directive
principles which only a long philosophic education and especially
Christianity have rammed into restive human docility. Toussenel and
Romanes are rarely superior to the possessors of a prodigious dog or
miraculous cat: one must reject as apocryphal the anecdotes of animals'
intelligence, and especially those boasting their sensibility, or
celebrating their virtues; not that these are of necessity, inexact,
but because the manner of interpreting them has vitiated, in principle,
the manner of observation. One sole observer appears to me trustworthy
in these matters, namely J. H. Fabre, the man who, since Réaumur, has
penetrated furthest into the intimacy of insects, and whose work is
veritably the creator, perhaps without his having suspected it, of a
general psychology of animals.

The madness of attributing to beasts the intuitive knowledge of our
moral catechism has created the legend of the elephant's sexual
modesty. These chaste monsters hide, they say, to make love; animated
by a wholly romantic sensibility, they can not give way to their
feelings save in the mystery of the jungle, in the labyrinth of the
virgin forests: that is why they have never been known to breed
in captivity. Nothing is more idiotic; the elephant in the public
garden or the circus is ready enough to make love, although with less
enthusiasm than in his native forest, as is the case with nearly
all beasts newly captive. He breeds under man's eye with perfect
indifference, and no showman can prevent the she-elephant, who is very
lecherous, from manifesting with full voice her shameless desires.
As her vulva opens not between her legs but toward the middle of her
abdomen, Buffon believed that she had to lie on her back to receive the
male. This is not so, but she has to make a particular gesture: she
kneels.

Whales who are by far the greatest mammals, obey a special rite,
imposed by their lack of members and the element in which they live;
the two colossi heave over on their sides like sprung ships, and join
obliquely, belly to belly. The male organ is enormous, even in the
state of rest, six or eight feet long and fifteen or sixteen inches
in circumference. The vulva of the female is longitudinal; near it is