MECHANISM OF LOVE

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

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:anatifeis the abridgement ofanatifere, duck-bearing, latinanas, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 pleasuresac 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 theempuse, a kindred specie, seems peaceful.

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 whichamans volat currit ac lætatur. The whole passage of theImitatio(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 thedanse 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.

TheGrande Encyclopédiehas 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 read, thinks of the thieving magpie, and adds, these traits which are common to them ally them closely to birds of paradise and corvida. Doubtless, but that is not very important. The grave fact is the gathering of the first flower. The useful fact explains animality; the useless fact explains man. Now, it is of capital importance to show that the useless fact is not peculiar to man alone.

Crickets also have courting fights, but perhaps for a different reason: the feebleness of their offensive weapons, and the solidity of their armour. There is, however, a winner and loser. The loser decamps, the conqueror sings. Then he shines himself, stamps, seems nervous. Fabre says that emotion often renders him mute; his elytra (wing-shells) shake without giving a sound. The female cricket, witness of the duel, runs to hide under a leaf as soon as it is over. "She draws back the curtain a little, and looks out, and wants to be seen." After this play, she shows herself completely, the cricket rushes forward, makes a half-turn, rears up and slides under her belly. The work finished, he gets away as fast as possible, for we are before an enigmatic orthopter, the female is quite ready to eat him. It is the male's song which attracts the female cricket. When she hears it, she listens, takes her bearings, obeys the call. It is the same with cicadas, even though the two sexes usually live side by side. By imitating the sound of the male, one can deceive the females and make them come to one.

Sometimes sight, sometimes smell guides the male. Many hymenoptera, furnished with a powerful visual organ keep watch for the females, spying the vicinity. Thus also many day butterflies. When the male notices a female, he pursues, but in order to get in front of her, to be seen, and he seems to tempt her with slow waving of his wings. This display lasts often quite a long time. Finally their antennæ touch, their wings stroke each other, and they fly off in company. The coupling often takes place in the air; thus among pierides. In certain species, bombyx for example, the females are heavy and even aptera, the male who is in contrast lively, fecundates several, going from one to the other, which is doubtless what gives butterflies their reputation for inconstancy. They live too short a time to deserve it: many born in the morning do not see the next day's sun. One might rather make them a symbol for pure thought. There are some who do not eat, and among those who do not eat there are some whom nature has vowed to virginity. Hermaphrodites of a singular sort, male on the right side, female on the left, they seem to be two sexual halves welded together along the medial line. The organs whose centre is cut by this line are but demi-organs good for nothing save the entertainment of observers. Hybrid butterflies, produced by crossing of two species, are not very rare; they also are incapable of reproduction.

The coupling of day butterflies lasts only a few minutes, among night butterflies it is often prolonged for a day and a night, as in sphinx, phalenes, noctuelles. If it is a reward, it is due to their long courageous voyages in quest of the female whom they have divined. The great-peacock moth covers several leagues of country in the attempt to satisfy his desire. Blanchard tells of a naturalist who having caught a female bombyx and put her in his pocket, returned home escorted by a cloud of over two hundred males. In spring, in a place where the great-peacock is so rare that one with difficulty finds one or two per year, the presence of a caged female will draw a hundred males, as Fabre has shown by experiment. These feverish males are endowed with very brief ardour. Whether or no they have touched a female, they live but two or three days. Enormous insects, larger than a humming-bird, they do not eat; their bocal pieces are merely an ornament, a decor: they are bora to reproduce and to die. The males seem infinitely more numerous than the females, and it is probable that not more than one in an hundred can accomplish his destiny. He who misses the pursued female, who arrives too late, is lost: his life is so short that it would be very difficult for him to discover a second. It is true that in normal circumstances the female should stop emitting her sexual odour as soon as she has been ridden; the males are thus attracted by the same female through a proportionately shorter time and there is this much less chance of their searches being unfruitful. Is it their sense of smell alone that guides them?

At 8 a. m. at Fabre's place in Serignan, one saw the cocoon of a lesser-peacock moth open; a female emerged and was immediately imprisoned in a wire cage. At noon a male arrived, the first that Fabre, who had lived there all his life, had ever seen. The wind was blowing from the north. The male came from the north, that is to say, against the scent. At two o'clock ten had arrived. Having come as far as the house without hesitation, they were troubled, got the wrong window, wandered from room to room, never went directly toward the female. One would say that at this point they should have used another sense, perhaps sight, despite their being crepuscular creatures, or that the cage bothered them. Perhaps also it is the custom for the female to come and play before them? It is, in any case, evident that sense of smell plays an important rôle; the mystery would not be less great if one supposed the bringing into play of a special sense, that of sexual orientation. Fabre has obtained equal success with the female of a very rare butterfly, the oak bombyx, or banded minime: in one morning sixty males arrived, turning about the prisoner. One has observed analogous if not identical things in certain serpents, in mammifera: everyone has seen dogs in the country, drawn by a female in heat, coming from a considerable distance, nearly a league, without one's being able to say how their organism had got the news.

Explanations are vain in these matters. They divert the curiosity without satisfying the reason. What one sees clearly is a necessity: the act must be accomplished, to this end, all obstacles, whatever they are, will be overcome. Neither distance, nor the difficulty of the voyage, nor the danger of the approach can drive back the instinct. In man, who has sometimes the power to escape the sexual commandments, disobedience may have happy results. Chastity, as a transmuter, may change unused sexual energy into intellectual or social energy; in animals this transmutation of physical values is impossible. The compass needle remains in one immutable position, obedience is unescapable. That is why there is so deep a rumble in nature when the spring orders are posted. Vegetable flowers are not the only ones to open: sexes of flesh also flower. Birds, fish take on new and more vivid colours. There are songs, plays, pilgrimages. Salmon who live quietly at the river-mouths, must gather, depart, climb the streams, pass weirs, scrabble against rocks which form the dams and cataracts, wear themselves out leaping as arrows against all human and natural obstacles. Males and females arrive worn out at the end of their journey, thefrayèreof fine sand where they are to lay their eggs, and the males heroically to spend the milt distilled from their blood.

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