The Natural Philosophy of Love
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Title: The Natural Philosophy of Love
Author: Remy de Gourmont
Translator: Ezra Pound
Release date: July 27, 2014 [eBook #46428]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46428
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE ***
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.
CHAPTER III
SCALE OF SEXES
Asexual reproduction.--Formation of the animal colony.
--Limits of asexual reproduction.--Coupling.--Birth of
the sexes.--Hermaphrodism and parthenogenesis.--Chemical
fecundation.--Universality of parthenogenesis.
The primitive mode of reproduction is asexual, or what one will so
consider provisorily, in comparison with more complex mechanism. In the
first living forms there are neither sexual organs nor differentiated
sexual elements. The animal reproduces itself by scissiparity or by
budding; the individual divides itself in two parts, or a protuberance
develops, forms a new being and then separates.
Scissiparity is an inexact term, for the division is transversal, and
the two parts far from equal; it occurs in protozoaires, and further
in worms, star-fish and polyps. Budding is common to protozoaires,
infusoria, 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
found the udder which projects greatly when she gives suck. This udder
has ejectory power, the whale cub hooks on by his lips, and the milk is
sent to him as from a pump, marvellous accommodation of organs to the
necessities of the milieu.
Anatomy forces female seals and walruses to turn over to receive the
male. In the specie commonly called the sea-lion, she seems according
to observations perhaps too sketchy, to make the advances. The male
being stretched out at rest she rolls before him, plagues him, while he
grumbles. She succeeds in moving him, and they go to play in the water.
On return the female lies on her back, the male who is much thicker and
longer covers her, propping himself on his arms. The coupling lasts
seven or eight minutes. The posture of female seals is also that of
hedgehogs, and truly the cavalage here must be particularly thorny.
Despite his roof the male tortoise climbs onto the female and installs
himself there, clinging to her shell with the nails of his forefeet;
there he stays fifteen days having slowly introduced into her patient
organs his long round prong, ending in a sort of pointed ball, pressing
with all his strength the enormous clitoris of the female. We find
ourselves far from mammifers and from the excitability of the bull;
this coupling which lasts a whole season leads us toward the voluptuous
laziness of disgusting and marvellous gasteropodes. According to tales
which are, perhaps, not contradictory, crocodiles couple in the water,
according to some, and on land according to others; in water laterally;
on land, the female on her back. It is said to be the male who puts her
on her back, and who, coition completed, helps her to right herself;
charming spectacle, which I can not guarantee to be so, but which would
improve our idea of the gallantry of these ancient divinities.
I don't know whether anyone has ever remarked that the caduceus of
Mercury represents two serpents coupled. To describe the caduceus is
to describe the love mechanism of ophidians. The bifurcated penis
penetrates the vagina, the bodies interlace fold on fold while the two
heads rise over the stiffened coils and look fixedly at each other, for
a long time, eye gazing into eye.
Certain fish have penial organs; they can then realize true copulation;
thus dog-fish, bounce, sharks, sea-hinds (_biches_). The males grip
the females and hold them with hooks often formed at the expense of
the abdominal fin, by cartilaginous pieces which penetrate the female
orifice and serve as slide to the penis. The male skate seizes the
female, turns her over, clamps himself to her, belly to belly, holds
her with his penial tentacles and finishes the coupling, releasing his
seed which flows into the cloaca. The operation is repeated several
times; separated by the emission of skatelets who are born alive, it
continues until the female has discharged the greater part of her eggs.
[1] Here R. de G. uses the term _marmotte_; up to this the word I have
translated marmoset has been ouistiti.
CHAPTER X
MECHANISM OF LOVE
_II. Copulation
(continued).--Arthropodes.--Scorpions.--Large
aquatic crustaceans.--Small crustaceans.--The
hydrachne.--Scutilary.--Cockchafer.--Butterflies.--
Flies, etc.--Variation of animals' sexual habits._
Among insects, batrachians, and mollusks one finds the most curious
modes of fecundation and those furthest removed from the usual
mechanism of mammals; before coming to that we will give a few
examples, toward forming an idea of the sexual habits of various
species chosen from the arthropodes. In scorpions, let us say,
terrestrial representatives of aquatic crustaceans: the two sexes are
identical, genital organs usually invisible, hidden between the abdomen
and the cephalothorax, the front part of it where the head without neck
is prolonged directly into the thorax. The male is provided with two
rigid penes englobed in a sheath--double but forming a single canal;
holding the female belly to belly he inserts them in the vulva, one
branch bending to the left, the other to the right toward each of the
two oviducts. Same mechanism in crustaceans, save in the rare cases
when they are hermaphrodite. Lobsters, langousts, écrevisses, crabs,
like the scorpion, couple in a manner singularly resembling that of
humans. Curious spectacle, that of the hen lobster attacked by the
male, turned on her back, patiently permitting him to stretch over her,
enlacing her claws and his pincers! Vision of a sabbat which Callot or
Doré would only have painted in fear. Perhaps one would consider this
before opening the armoured belly of these beasts who have bred their
species among algæ, and in holes of the rocks? The genital glands of
crustaceans are excellent; people gladly eat those of the sea-anemone;
the only good part of these spiny animals. The males of the greater
crustaceans have erectile ejectory canals, rising in the form of double
prong between the forefeet; the females are correspondingly provided
with two vulvæ opening in the third sternal segment, or at the base of
the feet corresponding to this segment. Copulation is effected by quick
acts, reiterated two or three times, lasting a quarter of an hour. The
male of the fresh water prawn who swims leaning on his side, holds his
female between his claws and progresses by bounds; she is much smaller
than he is. Same mechanism in aselle and talitre or sea-flea.
There are many singularities in the sexual habits of small crustaceans,
the male bopyre lives as parasite on the female, who is four or
five times larger; oddity increased by the female herself being the
parasite of the palemon. It is she who forms the little bloatedness
which one notices, grayish when cooked, on the heads of shrimps,
turned pink. Fishermen state that this spot is a small sole, but they
also tell other yarns: for example, that anatifes, the peduncular
mussels which one sees on drift-wood are the embryos of wild-ducks,
and one noble sailor has himself seen them taking flight.[1] The
male linguatula is also smaller than the female, he has one testicle
but two long copulating organs which simultaneously penetrate the
female, ejaculating toward the two ovaries. Another small male is the
hydrachne, water acarian, two or three times smaller than the female,
he alone is provided with a tail at the end of which are his genital
organs; the female's are formed by a papilla situated beneath the belly
and marked by a white patch surrounding the sluice. The male swims, the
female comes to meet him, lifts herself obliquely and brings her white
spot into touch with her lover's caudal extremity, the junction is
accomplished. One then sees the male drag along the kicking female; the
coupling, with periods of rest, but without interruption of profound
contact continues for several days.
With insects of superior talents it is, on the contrary, the female who
carries off the male: the ant carries hers on her back, while he bends
his abdomen into a bow toward her vulva; thus weighted, she flies,
mounts, planes, then falls with him like a drop of water. He dies on
the spot, the female gets up, returns to the nest, lays, before dying.
The fetes of the ant are of the whole ant hill at once, the fall of
the lovers like a golden cascade, and the resurrection of the females
gleams in the sun like a russet foam. The scutilary is an insect
sometimes squarish or shield-shaped resembling the green wood louse,
sometimes long and cylindrical with points and lines of all colours
on its wings. One of them, scutiform, known as lineata, with red back
and black stripes, is common on umbellifera. Copulation takes place
end to end; one can see them thus, the female towing the smaller male
from leaf to leaf, from umbel to umbel.[2] The forficula also couple
end to end, fleas, whose male is smaller, couple belly to belly with
feet enlaced; the position recalling that of dragon flies is more
remarkable, in the louvette, a small insect which lives on broom, and
readily throws itself upon man: the vulva is in fact, near the mouth.
Coleoptera are given to cavalage, of duration varying from ten hours
to two days. The male cockchafer pursues the female with fervour,
he is so ardent that he often mounts other males, deceived by the
odour of rut floating in the air. He seizes the female and holds her
clamped by his forelegs and genital hooks. The union continues a day
and a night, finally the male, exhausted, falls over backward, and
still hooked by the penial pincers, is dragged along on his back
by the impassive female who moves on feeding, pulling him over the
leaves until death detaches him; then she lays and dies in her turn.
Butterflies are likewise very fervent, the males make veritable voyages
in quest of females, as Fabre has proved. They often fly coupled,
the stronger female easily carrying the male: it is a quite frequent
sight in the country, these butterflies with four wings who roll, a
little bewildered from flower to flower, drunken ships going where
the sails bid them. With flies, feminism is brought frankly into the
love mechanism. The females have the copulative apparatus; they force
their oviduct, then a veritable prong, into the male's belly; it is
the females who make the mastering gesture, the male merely grips this
gimlet with the hooks which surround his genital fent. It is this same
augur which the female uses to bore the wood, or earth or flesh where
she deposits her eggs. The coupling is end to end, and one of the
easiest to observe.
Here are enough examples to show what is permanent in the mechanism of
true copulation, and what is variable in its exterior modes. Given the
two chief pieces of the apparatus, the sword and the scabbard, nature,
as one might say, leaves it to the imagination of each specie to decide
the best manner of using them; all ways seem good if they fecundate.
Nature has still more remarkable methods, for the sexual inventions of
humanity are nearly all anterior or exterior to man. There is not one
whose model, even perfected, is not offered him by the animals, by the
most humble of animals.
If there is no general rule, if there is no one moral manner of
fecundating a female, one must recognize that the same mode is fixed
in the same specie, in the same genus or family. I do not think that
anyone has observed variation in the sexual habits of an animal; yet
acts of sheer disembarrassment being possible, one can not consider
the love method as being rigorously fixed. It has varied in social
bees, parting from the relation of the couple, the aggression of the
male, to end in the political and autocratic fecundation of a sole
female by a sole male chosen among an hundred slave favourites. The
mechanism itself must have changed with the change of the organs,
complying with corporal circumstances and with those of the milieu,
under pressure of the nervous system which demands acts without
caring for the instruments which must execute them. One finds proof
of these changes in the accidental hermaphrodism of a great number
of invertebrates and even of fishes, such as the cod, the herring,
the scomber: a fundamental change since it shifts the animal from a
superior to an inferior category; a recall to origins, doubtless,
and an indication that the species liable to such accidents are
far from being physiologically fixed. It is very probable that
analogous accidents, less accentuated, visible sometimes in exterior
malformation, invisible in their psychological influence, are the cause
of certain tendencies in contrast to the sex apparent or even real.
But this does not yet answer the main question: are there in animals,
apart from purely mechanical aberrations, erotic fantasies? One can
not answer with certainty. The animal merely follows a groove; when he
has gone through it, if he lives for another season, he merely goes
over the same ground, attentive to the same need, submitted always to
the same gestures. Very true, but the animals familiar to man or his
neighbours, the dog, the ape, perhaps the cat, are assuredly capable
of erotic fantasies; it is therefore difficult to deny this tendency
to other animals, to the so intelligent hymenoptera, for example. Who
knows, moreover, whether certain eccentric modes of copulation are not
fixed fantasies, become habit and having supplanted an anterior method,
the animal being little able to employ two customs at once?
What we have found, at least, is that the love mechanism is, in nature,
of infinite variety, and that if it appears stable in most of the fixed
species, it is, in its entirety extremely oscillating, capricious, and
fantastic.
[1] The name of these cirripedes bears witness to this superstition:
_anatife_ is the abridgement of _anatifere_, duck-bearing, latin _anas,
anatis_, "A tree equally marvelous, is that which produces barnacles,
for the fruits of this tree change into birds." (Mandeville's Travels.)
[2] This does not seem to be general. I have recently observed, on the
umbels of wild carrots, numerous couples of scutilaries, proceeding by
cavalage, the male inert, couched on the walking female, who started at
the least alarm. Form narrow, almost cylindrical; colour: orange red,
with two short black bands: strong sucker, long antennæ. Union lasting
at least a day and a night.--R. de G.
CHAPTER XI
THE MECHANISM OF LOVE
_III. 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._
_III. Of birds and fish_. It is toward the middle of the second month
that the separation of the cloaca into two regions is marked in the
human foetus: a partition is formed which will absolutely isolate
the digestive channel from the uro-genital. The persistence of the
cloaca is not a sign of primitivity, since one finds it in selacians,
batrachians, reptiles, monotremes and birds. The uro-genital region of
marsupials and of several rodents is submitted to a single sphincter,
witness of original union.
The bird's cloaca is divided into three chambers, for the three
functions, the outer orifice being necessarily unique, by definition.
It is with this rudimentary apparatus that most birds turn to the
pleasures of love. The male being wholly deprived of any erectile
tissue, coition is by simple contact, a pressure, perhaps a rubbing;
displeasing as the comparison may be, it is a play analogous to
the mouth to mouth kiss, or, if one prefer, to the pressing of two
sapphists clasped vulva to vulva. Far from being a regression or a
stop, it is perhaps a progress, the male at least gaining in security
and vigour, being obliged to very little muscular development. The
salacity of certain birds is well known, and one does not see that the
absence of an exterior penis diminishes their ardour, or attenuates the
pleasure which they find in these succinct contacts. Perhaps the direct
genital pleasure is concentrated in a vascular papilla which swells a
little at the moment of the approaches; this is very rudimentary, often
unnoticeable but it seems to be an exciting organ, the producer of
pleasure. The male mounts the female, holds her with feet and beak, the
two cloaca are superposed, the sperm flows into the oviduct. One sees
sparrows repeat the sexual act as often as twenty times, always with
the same excitement, the same expression of contentment; the female
tires first, and shows her impatience. Birds' habits are especially
interesting in reason of the play with which they surround their love
making, their parades, their combats; we will deal with this in later
chapters.
Batrachians live for hardly anything save reproduction. Outside their
season of love, they remain stupefied. The rut over-excites them, and
these slow, frozen animals then show themselves ardent and implacable.
The males fight for the possession of females; having seized a female,
nothing will make the male let go. One has seen him stick to his post
even after his hind legs were cut off, even after losing half his
body. Yet the copulation is mere simulacrum, it takes place by simple
contact in the absence of exterior organs, even in salamanders, despite
the pads which surround the cloaca, sketch of an apparatus which has
remained extremely rudimentary, or possibly problematic. With anours,
the male, smaller than the female, climbs on her back, passes his
forefeet, his arms, under her armpits and remains skin to skin for a
month, for two months. At the end of this time the pressed flanks of
the female finally let fall the eggs, and he fecundates them as they
fall. Such is the coupling of frogs, lasting from fifteen to twenty
days. The male clambers onto the female, encircles her with his arms,
crosses his hands over her breast, and holds her tightly embraced.
He then remains immobile, in an ecstatic state, insensible to every
external shock, to every wound. It would seem that the sole aim of this
enlacing is to exercise a pressure on, or to cause an excitement in,
the belly of the female and to make her deliver her eggs. She lays a
thousand and the male sprays them with sperm as they pass.
All the anours (tailless batrachians) thus press their females like
lemons; but the method of fecundating the eggs is quite variable.
The mid-wife toad enlaced like the others, aids the emergence of the
egg garland with his hind feet, he unrolls it grain by grain, with
devotion, while the female, immobile emptier, lends herself willingly
to this manœuvre, which she feels perhaps as a caress. The aquatic
toad does not pull at the garland, he receives it in his paws, and when
he has ten eggs or so, he sprinkles them, ejaculating with a movement
of the flanks, which old Roesel[1] compares to that of a dog's in
coition. As for the common land toad, whose note sounds like a pure
crystal bell in calm of the evening, he waits until all the eggs have
emerged, he arranges them in a heap, then excited by somersaults, he
drenches the lot of them.
But no batrachian patience is as curious as that of the pipa toad.
This is a hideous beast with small eyes, mouth surrounded with
whisker-prickles, skin blackish green, full of warts and swellings. As
the eggs are laid the male fecundates them, then taking them in his
large webbed feet he spreads them out on the female's back. Around
each egg there forms a little protective pustule, in which the young
hatch. The female on whom a hatch commences offers the odd spectacle of
a back whence, here and there, heads and feet are sprouting, or from
which emerge little toads as if born of a paradox.[2] This formation
is another proof that nature finds anything good which happens to
attain her purpose, and that she cares only for the perpetuation of
life. An incubatorial pocket was necessary, and she had forgotten it;
no matter, the animal will make one for itself, at its own expense or
at the expense of some other specie. The small pipas exercize a real
parasitism, ordered by an absent-mindedness of nature. Whether the
deposit of eggs be in the mother's back or in the tissue of some other
animal the parasitism is no less evident, at most it is a question
of degree. From this point of view it will be possible to consider
the normal, internal evolution of sexual products as a parasitic
evolution: the young of the mammal is a parasite of its mother, as the
little ichneumon is a parasite of the caterpillar which serves it as
uterus. Thus considered the notion of parasitism temporary or larval
will disappear, or, rather, take a much greater extension, enveloping
a considerable number of facts up till now separated in irreducible
categories.
Fecundation by contact is very rare in fish, other than selacians.
One hardly finds it save in lophobranchi and certain other viviparous
fish, such as the blenny; the milt penetrates the female organs without
copulation, and the eggs develop either in these organs, or in a pouch
which the male carries under his belly, or even in the male's mouth,
he having thus the virtue of assuring the birth of his offspring. The
lophobranchi are wholly singular fish, one of them, the sea-horse,
horse-headed ludion, gives a good idea of the family. Ordinary fish,
such as one knows and eats, however M. de Lacépède may have classified
them, are chaste animals void of all erotic fantasy.
What would appear to be the essential of pleasure is unknown to them.
The males do not know possession nor the females surrender, no touch,
no rubbings, no caress. The object of male desire is not the female but
the eggs, he watches for those she is about to lay, he searches for
those she has laid, an excitement quite like those produced by onanism,
or which are engendered by fetishism in certain distorted minds and
which operate at the sight of a slipper or ribbon, and die down, even
to frigidity in the presence of the woman herself. The fish spends his
semen on eggs which he finds floating and whose mother he has never
seen. Often both eggs and male milt are left floating and meet only in
the chance of current and wave. Sometimes fish form a separate couple.
The female swims up stream, stops over a grass or sand bottom, the male
follows, obeying her gesture. Such habits have permitted people to
breed fish with as great a certainty as they breed mushrooms, or more
so. One takes a female swelled with eggs, squeezes her like an orange,
then one empties a male of his milt, and nature takes charge of the
rest. This procedure is not possible with certain species which act in
concert, the male tilted onto his back, his genital orifice beneath
that of the female, and ejaculating in time with her.
One knows that salmon swim up rivers in troops, often very dense,
and into the branch streams and creeks, to lay their spawn in quiet,
favorable nooks. Then they go down stream worn out by the dams and
waterfalls which they have mounted by tail-swishing, and tired by their
genital exercises. The column is often led by a female, the other
females follow. Then swim the old males and lastly the young males.
When the leaderess has found a suitable place, one of the roes stops,
hollows the sand with her belly, leaves a packet of eggs in the hole,
an old male drenches them at once, but the patriarch has been followed
by young bucks who imitate him and fecundate the same eggs. Thus, with
these fish there is a sort of school where the experienced teach the
newcomers the procedure of fecundation. This mixture of eggs and semen
from fish of all ages should be very favourable to the maintenance of
a specific type, if the instability of milieu did not bring about the
encounter of elements belonging to different neighbouring varieties:
despite the good will of naturalists, salmon and trout form practically
only one family, and nothing is more difficult, for example, than to
determine the specie of a young salmon, or to state the difference
between a salmon and a sea trout.
The loves of fish (and also of echinoderms, star-fish, sea-anemones,
etc.) thus reduce themselves, in the main, to those of ovule and
spermatozoide. The essential. But such simplification is rather
shocking to the sensibility of a superior vertebrate, or to an insect
accustomed to the amorous parade, to multiple and prolonged contacts,
to the presence and complexity of the opposite sex. This fashion of
love is, admittedly, not unknown to men, but they seem to be led to
it rather by necessity than by taste, by morals rather than by the
search for the maximum pleasure. Genital satisfactions obtained apart
from contact, apart from being necessarily infecund, save in scabrous
scientific experiments, often cause a nervous and muscular depression
greater even than excess committed in common. But this result is not
so evident that one can convert it into a moral principle, and the
fact remains that onanism, carefully considered, is one among nature's
gestures. A different conclusion would be more agreeable; but millions
of creatures would protest, from all the oceans, and from beneath the
reeds of all rivers. One might go further, and insinuate that this
method which appears to us monstrous, or, since it is a matter of fish,
singular, is perhaps superior to the laborious method of cavalage, so
ugly, in general, and so inconvenient. But there is not in terrestrial
nature, any more than in conceivable nature a high and low, a wrong
side and a right side; there is neither a good nor evil manner, a
right nor a wrong, but there are states of life which fulfill their
purpose, since they exist and since existence is their aim. Doubtless
the discord between the will and the organs is constant in all stages
of life, and much accentuated in man where the wishes are multiplex,
but where the nervous system remains, in short, the master, and governs
even to the danger of its life. It is not the chance of circumstances
and of milieu that has swelled the spermoduct of certain fish into
papilla, and then into penis, or formed a sheath for this penis at the
expense of the caudal fin; it is the will force of cerebral ganglia.
The evolution of the nervous system is always in advance of that of
the organs, this is a cause of incoherence, and at the same time, of
progress and change. The day when the brain has no more orders to give,
or when the organs have exhausted their faculties of obedience, the
specie is fixed; if fixed in a state of incoherence it moves toward
certain extinction, as the monotremes. Many species seem to have been
destroyed in full evolution by the contradictory exigencies of a
tyrannous and capricious nervous system.
It is necessary that the male cephalopode fecundate the female. How
will he do it, having no organic sperm-vector? He will make one. One
thought for a long time that the female argonauts were preyed on by
a parasite. This mysterious beast is nothing but the instrument of
fecundation. The male has a pouch where sperm accumulates; in this
pouch are made up little bags called spermatophores, the animalculæ
move toward the third arm of the argonaut (nautilus), and this arm
enlarges in spatula, equips itself with a scourge, loses its suckers,
and then when heavy with life as a ripe grape, it falls off, moves
toward the female, comes alongside her belly, lodges in the palleal
cavity and oozes out its seed into the organs where this will encounter
the ovules. The male organ, here, appears as a temporary individual, a
third being between father and mother, a messenger which carries the
male genital treasure to the female. Neither of them knows the other.
The male is wholly ignorant of the female for whom he detaches a limb,
and the female knows nothing of her fecundator save the sole organ
which fecundates. A little more complicated than that of the fish,
this method is probably older, and seems possible only for aquatic
animals. It is nevertheless that of many vegetables; this swimming
arm recalls the winged grains of pollen which travel far from their
pistils. Very few flowers can fecundate directly; nearly all have need
of an intermediary, the wind, an insect, a bird. Nature had given wings
to the phallus, ages before the imagination of Pompeian painters; she
had thought of this, not for the pleasure of bashful women, but for
the satisfaction of the most hideous beasts that people the ocean,
cuttlefish, calamaries, octopi.
[1] In his "Historia Naturalis Ranarum," 1758, Bufo aquaticus.
[2] The back as gestative chamber is also found in woodlice, during
one of their parthenogenetic phases, cf. Fabre "Souvenirs" VII, _les
Pucerons du terebinthe_.
CHAPTER XII
THE MECHANISM OF LOVE
_IV. Hermaphrodism.--Sexual life of
oysters.--Gasteropodes.--The idea of reproduction
and the idea of pleasure.--Mechanism of
reciprocal reproduction: helices.--Spintrian
habits.--Reflections on hermaphrodism._
Fish are the only vertebrates among whom one encounters hermaphrodism,
either accidental: cyprins, herrings, scombers; or regular, sargue,
sparaillon, seran. The myxines, very humble fish living as parasites,
are alternative hermaphrodites, like oysters, like ascides; the genital
gland functions first as testicle, then as ovary. The amphioxus, the
bridge between invertebrates and vertebrates, is not hermaphrodite.
The most strongly marked and most complicated forms of hermaphrodism
are found in mollusks, and chiefly in gasteropodes. The alternate
hermaphrodism of oysters produces effects which have been observed
throughout antiquity. The advice to abstain from oysters during months
lacking an "r" is based on a fact, and that fact sexual. From September
to May, they are males, they are testicles, they elaborate sperm, they
are good; from June to August the ovaries bourgeon, fill with eggs
which turn whitish as they ripen, the oysters are females, they are
bad; fecundation takes place at this time, the spermatozoides, born
in the preceding period, finally perform their office. Superstitions
before being rejected ought to be minutely observed and analysed, there
is nearly always a kernel of truth in the gross envelope.
In the hermaphrodism of echinoderms, of fish, there is never
auto-fecundation; either the sexual products meet outside the animals,
which have neither copulating organs, nor a related genital life; it is
a simple growth of germs; or, in a more complex phase the individuals
have exterior male organs, and female organs, but they can not use them
without the aid of another individual acting either as male, or as
female. Here a new distinction is imposed: either the animal will be
successively male, and then female; or it will be both at once. This
union of the two sexes seems useless, according to human logic, when
the two genital glands ripen at different seasons; one understands it
better when the reciprocal fecundation is simultaneous, since this
doubles the number of females and better assures the conservation of
the specie. One must set aside the idea of pleasure. Apart from the
fact that we can judge it only by a very distant and even dubious
analogy considering the difference between the nervous systems of man
and mollusk, one must set it aside as useless. Pleasure is a result
not an aim. In most animal species coition is but a prelude to death,
and often love and death work their supreme act in the same instant.
Copulation of insects is suicide: would it be reasonable to consider
it as produced by a desire to die? One must dissociate the idea of
pleasure and the idea of love, if one wants to understand anything
of the tragic movements which perpetually beget life at the expense
of life itself. Pleasure explains nothing. People might simply be
commanded to die as a means of reproduction, they would obey with
the same eagerness: this is observed even in humanity. Dithyrambs on
pleasure would be misplaced apropos of the mutual ticklings of two
snails on a vine-leaf; the subject is rather uncomfortable.
Note then two helices, both bisexual, fulfilling exactly the biblical
phrase: "he created them male and female"; their genital organs are
very well developed; the penis and oviduct opening into a vestibule,
which in the act of copulation unbellies itself in part, so that the
penis and vagina come in touch with the orifice; mutual intromission
takes place. A third organ comes from the vestibule, without analogy in
superior animals; it is a little pocket containing a small stiletto,
a jewelled dagger; it is an excitative organ, the needle to prick up
desires. These beasts who have prepared for love by fasting, by long
rubbings, by whole days of close pressure, finally come to a decision,
the swords come out of their scabbards, they conscientiously stab each
other, this causes the penis to rise from its sheath; the double mating
is accomplished.
There are species in which the position of the organs is such that the
same individual can not be at the same time the female of the one for
whom he acts as male, but he can at that moment serve as female to
another male, who is female to a third, and so on. This explains the
garlands of spintrian gasteropodes which one sees realizing innocently
and according to the ineluctable wish of nature, carnal imaginations
that have been the boast of erotic humanity. Facing this light from
animal habits, debauchery loses all character and all its tang, because
it loses all immorality. Man, who unites in himself the aptitudes of
all the animals, all their laborious instincts, all their industries,
could not escape the heritage of their sexual methods; and there is no
lewdness which has not its normal type in nature, somewhere.
Before leaving this repugnant milieu, one may still consider the leech.
Hermaphrodite, they also practice reciprocal fecundation, but the
position of their organs compels them to assume a peculiar position:
the prong emerges from a pore near the mouth; the vagina is above the
anus. The copulation of these wretched animals forms, therefore, a
head-to-tail, the bocal sucker coinciding with the anal sucker.
Animals having both sexes, do not necessarily show sexual dimorphism.
But neither this exact likeness of individuals, nor the double function
with which they are charged, contradicts the general law which seems
to wish that an individual should be due to elements coming from
two different individuals. Autofecundation is exceptional, is very
rare. Whether or no the individual possess the two genital glands,
or one of them only, it needs a male, or an individual acting as
male, and a female or an individual acting as female, to perpetuate
life. Alternative hermaphrodism confirms these propositions, be it
that the same gland transforms itself totally, turn by turn, into
male principle, then into female principle; be it divided between a
male half and a female half, these two halves ripen simultaneously or
successively. When there is total or partial alternation, the male
principle is ready first, and waits: thus the aggressivity of the
male, and the passivity of the female are visible in the most obscure
manifestations of sexual life: the fundamental psychology of an ascide
does not differ from that of an insect, or from that of a mammal.
CHAPTER XIII
THE MECHANISM OF LOVE
_V. Artificial fecundation.--Disjunction of
the secreting apparatus from the copulating
apparatus.--Spiders.--Discovery of their copulative
method.--Brutality of the female.--Habits
of the epeire.--The argyronete.--The
tarantula.--Exceptions: the reapers.--Dragon-flies
(libellule).--Dragon-flies (demoiselle) virgins and
"jouvencelle."--Picture of their love affairs._
The apparatus for secreting sperm and that for copulating are sometimes
separated. The female has a vagina normally situated; the male has no
penis, or else it is situated in some part of the body not in symmetry
with the receiving apparatus. It is then necessary either for the male
to make an artificial penis, as one has seen in the cephalopodes,
and as in the spider, or for him to engage in complicated manœuvres
to dominate the female, and to engineer the conjunction of the two
apparatus, as does the dragon-fly (libellule).
The method of most arachnids strangely resembles the medical practice
called artificial fecundation, although it is hardly more so than
normal fecundation. In both it is a question of putting spermatozoides
in the way of encountering ovules: it matters little whether phallus
or syringe be the vehicle. The spider uses a syringe. For a long time
people thought that the whole genital apparatus was situated in the
feelers of the male, but anatomy could find nothing there to resemble
it. Savigny thought that the introduction of the feelers into the
vulva was merely an excitative manœuvre, and that the true copulation
followed. One had only observed half the act, the second phase. The
first consists in the male's gathering up the semence in his own belly
with the feelers; he then places it in the female organ. The maxillary
peripalpe or antenna, thus transformed into a penis, contains a spiral
canal which the male fills in placing it against the opening of his
spermatic canals. One sees the joint of one of the knuckles open,
letting appear a white bourrelet (pad with a hole in the middle), this
is bent, and plunged into the vulva, it emerges and the insect flees.
System marvellously adapted to the circumstances, for the female is
ferocious and quite ready to devour her suitor. But is it the ferocity
of the female which has modified the fecundating system, or is it the
system, so lacking in tenderness, which has led the receptress to find
only an enemy in the aspirant who advances horn to the fore? Acts which
produce constant and useful results always seem to us ordered by an
admirable logic; one need only give oneself up to a certain laziness
of mind, to be led quite gently to call them providential and to fall
little by little into the innocent nets of finalism.
Doubtless--and undeniable--there is a general finality, but one must
conceive it as represented entire by the present state of nature.
This will not be a conception of order, but a conception of fact,
and in any case, the means used to attain this fact should in no
way be integrated in the finality itself. None of the procedures of
generation, for example, bears the mark of necessity. It is not the
ferocity of the she-spider which demands the sexual habit; the female
mantis is still more savage, and mantis' method is cavalage. It does
not seem as if anything in nature were ordered in view of some benefit;
causes blindly engender causes; some maintain life, others force it to
progress, others destroy it; we qualify them differently, according to
the dictates of our sensibility, but they are non-qualifiable; they are
movements, and nothing else. The pebble ricochets on the water, or it
doesn't; this has no importance in itself, nothing more will come of it
and nothing less. It is an image of supreme finality: after eight or
ten bounds, life, like the pebble thrown by a child, will fall into the
abyss, and with it all the good and evil, all facts, all ideas, and all
things.
The idea of finality leads one back to the idea of fact, one is no
longer tempted to attempt an explanation of nature. One would try
modestly to reconstruct the chain of causes and, as a great number of
rings will always be lacking, and as the absence of one ring alone
would suffice to unhook the whole reasoning, one will do this in a
piety tempered by scepticism.
The epirus, although a spider, is not an ill-conditioned beast; she is
episcopal, she carries on her back a pretty white cross upside down.
The large ones are the females; the very small ones, the males. Both
hook their webs upon bushes, on shrubs, live without knowing each other
until instinct has spoken. A day comes when the male is restless; the
gnats fail to satisfy him; he leaves, he abandons the home he will
perhaps not see again. He is not, indeed, without misgivings, and fear
is mingled with his desire, for the mistress he seeks is an ogress.
Thus he prepares a way of retreat in case of combat; he stretches a
thread from the female's web to a neighbouring branch, road of entry,
gate of exit. Often, the instant he shows himself with his excited
air, the female epirus leaps on him and eats him without formality.
Is it ferocity? No, stupidity. She also is awaiting the male, but her
attention is distraught between the coming of the caller and the coming
of prey. The web has shaken, she leaps, enlaces, devours. Perhaps
a second male if he attempt the pass, will be gladly received, the
first sacrifice accomplished, perhaps this mistake, if it is one, will
wake all the amorous attention of the distracted female? Ferocity,
stupidity; there is another explanation which I will give later,
apropos the mantis and the green grass-hopper: it is very probable
that the sacrifice of the male, or of a male, is absolutely necessary,
and that it is a sexual rite. The little male approaches; if he is
recognized, and if his coming coincides with the genital state of the
female, she merely behaves like all the rest of her peers, and even
though she be the larger and stronger, she flees; she lets herself,
full of coquetry, slide down a thread; the male imitates the play, he
descends, she mounts, he mounts, the acquaintance is made, they feel
each other, they pat each other, the male fills his pump, the mating
is accomplished. She is rapid, the male stays on guard, ready to flee
at the least movement of his adversary; often he hasn't time. Scarcely
has the fecundation been finished when the ogress turns, leaping, and
devours the suitor on the very spot of his amours. They say that she
does not always wait for the end of the operation, and that preferring
a good meal to a caress, she interrupts the performance with a slap of
her mandibles. When the male has the luck to escape he disappears like
a flash, goes down his thread like greased lightning. The argyronete
uses manœuvres analogous, but even more curious. It is a water spider,
which goes under water in an ingenious small diving-bell, a future
nest. The female having made her diving-bell, the male, not daring to
present himself thinks out the wheeze of making another bell just next
that of the female. Then at a propitious moment he breaks through the
dividing wall and profits by the surprise of his sudden entry. When it
is a matter of not being eaten, all means are the right ones.
The tarantula, whose habits are far from gentle, is not cruel to
her suitor. This monster who spins no web, spins out a long idyllic
courtship. Extended preludes, puerile games, delicate caresses,
lambkins' leapings. Finally the female surrenders fully. The male
places her as he wishes, chooses for her the pose most pleasing to
him, and lies obliquely against her, gently and repeatedly taking the
sperm from his abdomen he insinuates each of his palpes, one after the
other in the swollen vulva of the female. The break-away is sudden,
a jump. Still more tender are the courtships of the leaping spider;
they advance by little rushes, stop, watch, leap on their prey, insect
or fly, or else float at the wind's will on the end of a long hanging
web-thread. When male and female meet, they approach, tap each other
with forefeet and tentacles, separate, reapproach, recommence. After
a thousand salutations, they pose head to head, the male climbs onto
the female, stretches out until he reaches the abdomen. Then he lifts
the extremity of it, applies his palpe to the vulva, and retires. The
same act is begun again several times, the female is all compliance
and offers no insult to her companion. There are certain exceptions to
the method of spiders; the reapers, little balls mounted on immense
legs, act by cavalage. The males have a retractile prong fixed by two
ligaments to the abdomen, the female an oviduct which opens in vulva
and spreads interiorly into a vast pouch, the resting place for the
eggs. The male does not manage this female, a strong objector, save
by seizing her mandibles with his pincers. Overcome by this bite she
submits; the coupling lasts several seconds.
The dragon-fly, gracefully called "la demoiselle," is one of the
finest insects in the world and certainly the most beautiful of those
which fly in our climate; no soft butterfly colour is a match for the
moving shimmer of its supple abdomen, and the bright head-colours as
of steely-blue helmet. Description? It is difficult to find two alike;
one has tawny body and dove-grey abdomen, spotted with yellow, and
black feet, transparent wings with brown borders or nerve-veinings,
or these in black and white; another has a yellow head, brown eyes,
brown corselet veined in green, an abdomen touched with green and
yellow, irised wings; another called "la Vierge" is gilded green, or
blue with green shimmer, and spotless wings; another "la Jouvencelle"
has wings thin to invisibility, is clothed in all shades, metallic
blue, reddish-brown green, iris violet, tawny chrysanthemum, whatever
her fundamental colour she encircles her elegant barrel with rings
of black velvet. Naturalists divide these insects into libellules,
æshnes, agrions; Fabricius disputes with Linnæus; peasants and children
(for grown-ups despise nature) call them "demoiselles," "vierges" and
"jouvencelles."[1] Some fly very high, in the trees, others along the
streams and over pond edges; others over ferns, reeds, broom. I have
passed days in the sun watching them, waiting to see their courtships;
I have seen them, and know that Réaumur has not deceived us. It was
on the surface of a pond among the border flowers, a morning of July,
a flaming morning. The "Vierge," corselet of blue green, almost
invisible wings, fluttered in great numbers, slowly, as if seriously;
the hour of parade had arrived. And everywhere couples formed, rings
of azure hung from the grass blades, trembled on leaves of the
water-lentil, everywhere green arrows and blue arrows played at flight,
and wing-brushing, at joining. The big eyes and strong head of the
libellule give an air of gravity to the brilliancy of this spectacle.
The ejaculatory canal opens at the ninth ring of the abdomen, that is
to say, at the point; the copulating apparatus is fixed at the second
ring, that is, near the neck, and is composed of a penis, of hooks, and
a reservoir: the male bending his long belly first fills the reservoir,
then empties it into the organs of the female. For a long time he
pursues the desired mistress, plays with her, finally seizes her above
the neck with the terminal pincers of his abdomen, then, turning like
a serpent, he bends forward and continues to fly, a beast with four
pairs of wings. In this attitude, the male, sure of himself, with the
air of the hour's indifferent master, chases midges, visits flowers
and the axilla of plants where the midges sleep, nabs them with his
feet and puts them into his mouth. Finally the female accedes, bends
downward her flexible abdomen and makes its orifice coincide with the
male's pectoral penis: the two beastlets are but one splendid ring with
a double cup, a ring trembling with life and with fire.
No gesture of love can be conceived more charming than that of the
female slowly bending back her blue body, going half way toward her
lover, who erect on his forefeet bears, with taut muscles, the full
weight of the movement. It is so pure, so immaterial, one would say
that two ideas joined in the limpidity of ineluctable thought.
[1] In America we have, so far as I know, only the terms "dragon
fly" and "darning-needle," and for the larger ones "devil's
darning-needle."--E. P.
CHAPTER XIV
THE MECHANISM OF LOVE
_VI. Cannibalism in sex.--Females who devour the
male, those who devour the spermatophore.--Probable
use of these practices.--Fecundation by the whole
male.--Loves of the white foreheaded dectic.--The
green grasshopper.--The Alpine analote.--The
ephippigere.--Further reflections of the cannibalism
of sex.--Loves of the praying mantis._
The spider eats her male; the mantis eats her male; in locustians,
the female is fecundated by a spermatophore, an enormous genital
bunch-of-grapes. She gnaws through this envelope of spermatozoides
to the last shred. These two facts should be brought together.
Whether the female swallow the male entire, or only the product of
his genital glands, it is probably in both cases a complementary act
of fecundation. There are possibly in the male, assimilable elements
necessary for the development of the eggs, almost as the albumen of
seeds, little aborted plants, is necessary for nourishing the vegetable
embryo, surviving plantlet. Plants, according to recent study, are born
twins: in order to live one must devour the other. Shifted to animal
life, and slightly modified, this mechanism explains what one terms,
from sentimentalism, the sexual ferocity of the she-mantis and the
she-spider. Life is made out of life. Nothing lives save at the expense
of life. The male insect nearly always dies immediately after the
mating; in locustians he is literally emptied by the genital effort:
whether the female respect, or devour him, his life would hardly be
longer, or shorter thereby. He is sacrificed; why, if this is for the
good of the species should he not be eaten? Anyhow, he is eaten. It is
his destiny, and he feels it coming, at least the male spider does, and
the male mantis allows himself to be gnawed with a perfect stoicism.
The spider jibs, the other submits. It is really a matter of ritual,
not of accident or of crime. One might try experiments. One might
prevent the female dectic from pecking the mistletoe berry which the
male has discharged on her; one might watch the coupling of mantes and
isolate them immediately: and then follow all the phases from laying to
hatching. If the spermatophagy of the dectic is useless, if the murder
of the male mantis is useless, it will annul the foregoing reflections,
and others will rise.
The white-fronted dectic is, like all the locustians (grass-hoppers),
a very ancient insect; it existed in the coal era, and it is perhaps
this antiquity which explains its peculiar fecundative method. As the
cephalopodes, his contemporaries, he has recourse to the spermatophore;
yet there is mating, there is embracing; there are even play and
caresses. Here are the couple face to face, they caress each other
with long antennæ "fine as hair," as Fabre says; after a moment they
separate. The next day, new encounter, new blandishments. Another day,
and Fabre finds the male knocked down by the female, who overwhelms him
with her embrace; he gnaws her belly. The male disentangles himself and
escapes, but a new assault masters him, he lies flat on his back. This
time the female, lifted on her high legs, holds him belly to belly;
she bends back the extremity of her abdomen; the victim does likewise;
there is junction, and soon one sees something enormous issue from the
convulsive flanks of the male, as if the animal were pushing out its
entrails. "It is," continues the best observer (Fabre, Souvenirs VI),
"an opaline leather bottle about the size and colour of a mistletoe
berry," a bottle with four pockets at least, held together by feeble
sutures. The female receives this leather bottle, or spermatophore, and
carries it off glued to her belly. Having got over the thunder-clap,
the male gets up, makes his toilet; the female browses as she walks.
"From time to time she rises on her stilts, bends into a ring, seizes
her opaline bundle in her mandibles, and chews it gently." She breaks
off little pieces, chews them carefully, and swallows them. Thus while
the fecundative particles are extravasated toward the eggs which they
are to animate, the female devours the spermatic pouch. After having
tasted it piece by piece she suddenly pulls it off, kneads it, swallows
it whole. Not a scrap is lost; the place is clear, and the oviscapte
is cleaned, washed, polished. The male has begun to sing again, during
this meal, but it is not a love-song, he is about to die; he dies:
passing near him at this moment, the female looks at him, smells him,
takes a bite of his thigh.
Fabre was unable to see the mating of the green grass-hopper, which
takes place at night, but he observed the long preludes; he has seen
the slow play of soft antennæ. The result of the coupling is the same
as with all locustians; the female chews and swallows the genital
ampulla. She is a terrible beast of prey who eats alive a huge cicada,
who fearlessly sucks the entrails of a wriggling cockchafer. One can't
say whether she eats her male, dead or alive; it is very probable for
he is quite timid. Another dectic, the Alpine analote, has given Fabre
the alarming spectacle: a male on his back, a female on his belly, the
genital organs joining end to end in this single contact, and while
she was receiving the fecundative caress, the enigmatic female, with
the fore part of her body raised, was gnawing with little mouthfuls,
another male held in her claws, impassive, his belly chewed open. The
male analote is much smaller and weaker than the female; like his
confrère the spider, he flees with greatest possible speed after the
end of coition; he is very often nipped. In the case observed by Fabre,
the meal was doubtless the end of a preceding amour: these locustians
have the habit, rare among insects, of receiving several suitors. Truly
this cannibal Marguerite de Bourgogne is a fine type of beast, and
gives a fine spectacle, not of immorality, an empty term, but of the
serenity of nature, which permits all things, wills all things, and for
whom there are neither vices nor virtues, but only movements and chemic
reactions.
The spermatophore of the ephippiger is enormous, nearly half the size
of the animal. The nuptial feast is finished according to the same
rite, and the female, having finished the leather-bottle spermatophore,
adds thereto the poor emptied male. She does not even wait until he is
dead; she chops him up, as he is dying, limb by limb: having fecundated
her with all his blood, he must feed her with all his flesh.
This male flesh is doubtless powerful comforting to the mother to
be. Female mammifers, after delivery, devour the placenta. One has
given different interpretations to this habitual act. Some see a
precaution against enemies: it is necessary to obliterate traces of
a condition which clearly shows that one is feeble, defenceless,
surrounded by young, a tasty prey at the mercy of any tooth; others
say it is a recuperation of energy. This latter opinion seems more
likely, especially if one consider the habits of locustians. The
spermatophore is indeed the preceding analogy to the placenta. On the
other hand, fecundation, before being a specific act, belongs to the
general phenomena of nutrition: it is the integration of one force in
another force, and nothing more. The devouring of the male, partial or
complete, represents, then, only the most primitive form of the union
of cellules, this junction of two unities in one, which precedes the
segmentation, feeds it, makes it possible during a limited time, after
which a new conjunction is necessary. If the actual acts are only a
survival, if they have lasted after their utility has disappeared, it
is another question, and one which I leave again to experimenters.
It will be enough for me if I have gained acceptance of the general
principle that animals' acts, whatever they may be, can not be
understood unless one strip them of the sentimental qualifications
beneath which ignorant humanity has covered them, corrupting them with
providential finalism.
While fully recognizing the immense social value of prejudices,
analysis should be permitted to excoriate them and to grind them.
Nothing appears more dear than maternal love, and nothing is more
widespread throughout all nature: yet nothing gives a falser
interpretation of the acts which these two words pretend to explain.
One makes a virtue of it, that is to say, in the Christian sense, a
voluntary act; one seems to think that it depends on the mother to
love or not to love her children, and one considers culpable those who
relax or forget their motherly cares. Like generation, motherly love is
a commandment; it is the second condition of the perpetuity of life.
Mothers sometimes are without it; some mothers also are sterile: the
will intervenes neither in one case nor in the other. As the rest of
nature, as ourselves, animals live submitted to necessity, they do what
they ought to do, so far as their organs permit them. The mantis who
eats her husband is an excellent egg-layer who prepares, passionately,
the future of her progeny.
After Fabre's observations of couples of these insects caged, the
female much stronger than the male mantes, are the predatory ones, who
do combat for love. The combats are deadly, the vanquished female is
eaten at once. The male is bashful. At the moment of desire he limits
himself to posing, to making sheep's eyes, which the female seems to
consider with indifference or disdain. Tired of parade, he finally
decides, and with spread wings, leaps trembling upon the back of the
ogress. The mating lasts five or six hours; when the knot is loosed,
the suitor is, regularly, eaten. The terrible female is polyandrous.
Other insects refuse the male when their ovaries have been fecundated,
the mantis accepts two, three, four, up to seven; and Bluebeard, eats
them regularly after the act is accomplished. Fabre has seen better.
The mantis is almost the only insect with a neck; the head does not
join the thorax immediately, the neck is long and flexible, bending
in all directions. Thus, while the male is enlacing and fecundating
her, the female will turn her head back and calmly eat her companion
in pleasure. Here is one headless, another is gone up to the corsage,
and his remains still clutch the female who is thus devouring him
at both ends, getting from her spouse simultaneously the pleasures
_ac mensa ac thoro_, both bed and board from her husband. The double
pleasure only ends when the cannibal reaches the belly: the male then
falls in shreds and the female finishes him on the ground. Poiret has
witnessed a scene perhaps even more extraordinary. A male leaps on a
female and is going to couple. The female turns her head, stares at the
intruder, and decapitates him with a blow of her jaw-foot, a marvellous
toothed-scythe. Without disconcertion the male, wedges up, spreads
himself, makes love as if nothing abnormal had happened. The mating
took place, and the female had the patience to wait for the end of the
operation before finishing her wedding breakfast.
The headless nuptials are explained by the fact that the insects' brain
does not seem to have unique control of its movements; these animals
can live without the cervical ganglion. A headless grasshopper will
still lift his bruised foot to his mouth, after three hours, with the
movement familiar to him in his complete condition.
The small mantis, or colourless mantis, is almost as fierce as her
great sister, the religious mantis; but the _empuse_, a kindred specie,
seems peaceful.
CHAPTER 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._
One has convinced oneself in the preceding chapters that the games of
love, preludes, caresses, combats are in no way peculiar to the human
race. On nearly all rungs of the animal ladder, or rather on all the
branches of the animal fan, the male is the same, the female is the
same. It is always the equation given in the intimate mechanism of
union of animalcule and ovule: a fortress toward which _amans volat
currit ac lætatur_. The whole passage of the _Imitatio_ (L. III, chap.
iv, 4) is a marvellous psychological presentation of love in nature,
of sexual attraction as it is felt throughout the whole series of
creatures. The besieger must enter the fortress; he uses violence,
sometimes gentle violence; more often trickery, the caress.
Caress, charming movements, grace, tenderness, we do all these things
of necessity, not because we are men, but because we are animals.
Their aim is to liven the sensibilities, to dispose the organism to
accomplish with joy its supreme function. They are, very probably,
agreeable to the individual and they are perceived as pleasure only
because they are useful to the species. This character of necessity is
naturally more apparent in animals than in man. In animals the caress
has fixed forms, of which the kiss, however, gives a good example; the
caress is an integral part of the cavalage. A prelude, but a prelude
which can not be omitted without compromising the essential part of
the drama. It happens, however, that man, able to overexcite himself
cerebrally, may abridge, or even neglect the prologue to coition: this
is also noted in certain domestic mammifers, the bull and stallion. The
mere sight or smell of the other sex is doubtless enough to produce a
state permitting immediate union. This is not the case with dogs, who
are still more domestic, the two sexes give themselves up to play, to
explorations, they demand each other's consent, courtship continues,
sometimes the male, despite his condition, retreats; more often the
female lowers the draw-bridge of her tail, and closes the fortress. One
knows the provocations of birds. M. Mantegazza has agreeably recounted
the sexual play of two vultures, the female shut in the carcass of an
almost devoured horse, interrupted her pecking of carrion, to groan
deeply, turning her head to look up into the air. A male vulture soared
above the larder, replying to the groans of the female. However, when
the overexcited male descended toward the supposedly willing vulturess,
she retreated into the carcass, and after a short dispute she made him
understand that the time was not yet ripe, and sent him off. After
which the groans recommenced; the female seemed annoyed; she mounted
the cage of bone, swelling her wings, lifting her tail, cooing. The
union finally took place in a great commotion of ruffled feathers and
shaken bones.
The same author has precisely noted the complicated preludes indulged
in by two sparrows. I give the résumé, graphically: A troop of sparrows
on the roof in the morning; calm, they make their toilet. Arrives a
large male who emits a violent cry; one of the females replies at once,
not by a cry but by an act: she leaves the group. The male joins her,
she flies to a neighbouring roof; there follows a long chatter beak to
beak. New flight; the male rests in the sun, then rejoins the minx. The
assaults begin, the male is repulsed. The female moves off, in little
hops. The edge of the roof stops the flight, she profits by this excuse
and surrenders.
But it is the prodigious insect whom one must interrogate. One knows
the cantharides, these beautiful coleoptera on whom pharmacy has
inflicted so wicked a reputation. The female gnaws her oak leaf, the
male arrives, mounts her back, enlaces her with his hind feet. Then
with his stretched abdomen he flagellates the female alternately to
right and left with frantic speed. At the same time he massages her,
lashes her neck furiously with his front feet, all his body shakes and
vibrates. The female remains passive, awaiting the calm. It comes.
Without letting go the male stretches out his forelegs in a cross,
unbends a little, wagging from head and corselet. The female starts
eating again. The calm is short; the male's follies recommence. Then
there is another manœuvre, with the fold of his legs and tarses, he
seizes the female's antennæ, forces her to lift her head, at the same
time redoubling the lashing of her flanks. New pose; new start of the
flagellation: finally the female opens. The coupling lasts a day and a
night, after which the male falls, but remains knotted to the female
who drags him from leaf to leaf, the penis attached to her organs.
Sometimes he also takes a mouthful here and there; when he drops off it
is to die. The female lays the eggs and dies in her turn. The cerocome,
an insect kin to the cantharide, has analogous habits, but the female
is even colder, and the male is obliged to tap more than one before
getting an answer. In vain he beats the sides of his chosen companion
with his paws, she remains insensible, inert. This action, moreover,
has the full appearance of having passed to a state of mania in the
male muscles, so much so that, in default of females, males mount and
pummel each other. As soon as a male is charged by another male he
takes the female attitude and remains quiet; one sees pyramids of three
or four males; in which case the top one is the only one wildly waving
his feet; the others remain immobile, as if their position of mounts
transformed them into passive animals: probably because their muscles
are pinned down. (For these two observations see Fabre, "_Souvenirs_,"
vol. II. _Cérocomes, mylabres et zonitis_.)
It is rare for a female to assist the male in his work, but there
remains the obstacle of the other males. Contrary to what one might
think, there is no relation between the male's social character and
his amorous character. Ferocious animals show themselves at the moment
of love-making much more placid than gentle or even timid animals.
The scary rabbit is an impetuous, tyrannous and jealous lover. If the
female does not accede to his first desire, he rages. She is, moreover,
very lascivious and gestation in no way interrupts her amours. The
hare, who does not pass for audacious, is an ardent and heady lover; he
fights furiously with his peers for the possession of a female. They
are animals very well equipped for love, the penis greatly developed,
clitoris almost as large. The males make real voyages, run for entire
nights in search of the doe-hare who is sedentary: like the doe-rabbit,
she never refuses, even when pregnant.
Martins, polecats, sables, rats fight violently during the rutting
season. Rats accompany their fights with sharp cries. Stags and
wildboars, and a great number of other species fight to the death for
the possession of females; a practice not unknown to humanity. Even
heavy tortoises feel exasperation from love; the defeated male is
tilted onto his back.
Finer, destined perhaps for a superior and charming civilization, the
birds like combat; sometimes the duel is serious, as in gallinaceæ,
cock-fights, often it is a courtesy, a mimicry. The female of
the rock-cock of Brazil is tawny and without beauty, the male is
yellow-orange, with crest bordered in deep red, the long wing feathers
and tail feathers are red-brown. One sees the females ranged in a
circle as a crowd about jugglers, the males are strutting, cutting
capers, moving their colour-shot feathers, getting themselves admired
and desired. From time to time a female admits that she is moved, a
couple is formed. But the tetras, heather-cocks of North America, have
still more curious customs. Their fights have become exactly what they
have with us, that is, dances. It is no longer the tourney, it is
the tour-de-valse. What completes the proof that these parades are a
survival, a transformation, is that the males, being amused by them,
perform them not only before but after coupling. They even practice
them for diversion while the females are sitting on the eggs, absorbed
in maternal duty. Travellers thus describe the tetras' dance (Milton
and Cheaddle, "Atlantic to Pacific," p. 171 of the French translation):
"They gather, twenty or thirty in a chosen place, and begin to dance
like mad. Opening their wings, they draw together their feet, like men
doing the _danse du sac_. Then they advance toward each other, do a
waltz turn, pass to a second partner, and so on. This contre-danse of
prairie chickens is very amusing. They become so absorbed in it that
one can approach quite near."
Birds of Australia and New Guinea[1] make love with a charming
ceremony. To attract his mistress the male makes a veritable
country-house, or, if he is less skilful, a rustic bower of greenery.
He plants rushes, green sprigs, for he is small, about the size of a
blackbird; he bends them into a vault, often a metre long. He strews
the floor with leaves, flowers, red fruits, white bits of bone, bright
pebbles, bits of metal, jewels stolen in the neighbourhood. They say
that when Australians miss a ring or a pair of scissors, they search
these green tents. Our magpie shows a certain taste for bright objects:
people tell tales about him. The "gardener-bird" of New Guinea is
still more ingenious, to such a degree that his work is mistaken for
human work and people are deceived thereby. With his beak and claws he
manages as well and better than peasants, often showing a decorative
taste which they lack. People search for the "origin of art": there
you have it, in the sexual game of a bird. Our æsthetic manifestations
are but a development of this same instinct to please which, in one
specie over-excites the male, in another moves the female. If there is
a surplus it will be spent aimlessly, for pure pleasure: that is human
art; its origin is that of the art of birds and insects.
The _Grande Encyclopédie_ has given a picture of the gardener-bird's
pleasure house. He is called in most scholarly parlance the Amblyornis
inornata, because he is lacking in personal beauty. One would take
his house for the work of some intelligent delicate pygmy. We find
the description of it, after the Italian traveller M. O. Beccari[2]
"In crossing a magnificent forest M. Beccari found himself suddenly
in the presence of a little conical cabin, in front of which was a
lawn strewn with flowers; he at once recognized the sort of hut which
M. Bruijn's huntsmen had described to him as the work of a dark bird
somewhat larger than a blackbird. He made a very exact sketch of it,
and verifying the native's tales by his own observation, he found
out how the bird makes this building which is not so much a nest
as a pleasure house. The amblyornis chooses a little clearing with
unbroken lawn and a small tree in the middle. Around this tree or bush
which serves as axis, the bird places a little moss, then he plants
slantwise the branches of a plant which will continue to grow for
some time; juxtaposition of branches form the inclined walls of the
hut. On one side they are left open to make a doorway, before which
is the garden whose elements are gathered with difficulty, tuft by
tuft, at some distance. After having carefully cleaned the lawn, the
amblyornis sows it with flowers and fruits which he collects in the
neighbourhood, and which he renews from time to time." This primitive
gardener belongs to the bird of paradise family, remarkable for
the beauty of their plumage. It seems that not being able to dress
himself, he has exteriorized his instinct. According to travellers,
these cabins are true houses of rendezvous, the country-boxes of the
seventeenth century, the "follies" of the XVIIIth. The gallant bird
ornaments it with everything that might please the invited female; if
she is satisfied, it is the abode of love, after having been that of
declarations. I do not know whether these oddities have been given the
importance which they should have been, in the history of birds and of
humanity. The scholar, the only person knowing such details, usually
fails utterly to understand them. One savant whom I rea
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