POLYGAMY

Spring is not the only rutting season. Love's calendar covers the year. In winter, wolves and foxes; in spring, the birds and fish; in summer, insects and many mammals; in autumn the deer. Winter is often the season chosen by polar animals; the sable couples in January; the ermine in March; the glutton, at the beginning and end of winter. Domestic animals have often several seasons; for the dog, cat and house-birds, spring and autumn. One finds young otters at any time. Most insects die after mating; but not all hemiptera, nor the queen bee, nor certain coleoptera, nor certain flies. The stag and the stallion empty themselves, but not the ram, nor the bull nor the he-goat. The duration of pregnancy in placentaires seems to have some relation to the size of the animal; mare, eleven to twelve months; ass, twelve months and a half; cow, doe, nine months; sheep, goat, wolf, vixen, five months; sow, four months; bitch, two months; cat, six weeks; rabbit, one month.

There are oddities: fecundated in August, the roe is not delivered until seven and a half months later, the embryo remaining a long time stationary, and waiting for the spring to start again. In a she-bat ovulation does not take place until the end of winter, although she has received the male in the autumn: females caught during hibernation have the vagina swollen with inert sperm which does not act until the spring waking.

[1]One has the unpronounceable name, savants designating it by the jumble of letters: Ptilinorhynches. The other is called the "gardener."

[2]The title of his study is curious "Les Cabanes et les jardins de l'Amblyornis." (Annales du Musée d'histoire naturelle de Gênes, 1876).

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 antelopes harem.—Human polygamy.—How it tempers the couple among civilized races.

There are no monogamous animals save those which love only once during their lifetime. Exceptions to this rule have not sufficient constancy to be erected into a counter-rule. There are monogamists in fact, there are none of necessity, from the time an animal lives long enough to commit the reproductive act several times. Free female mammals nearly always flee the male who has once served them, they need a new one. A bitch does not receive last season's dog save in direst extremity. This appears to me to be the struggle of the specie against variety. The couple is the maker of varieties. Polygamy drags them back to the general type of the specie. Individuals of a specie frankly polygamous should present a very great similarity; if the species incline toward a certain monogamy, the dissemblances become more numerous. It is not an illusion which makes us recognize in human races almost monogamous, a lesser uniformity of type than in polygamous societies or those given over to promiscuity, or among animal species. The example of the dog seems the worst that one could have chosen. It isn't, it is the best, considering that in receiving successively individuals of different variety, the bitch tends to produce individuals not of a specialized breed, but on the contrary of a type where several breeds will be mixed, individuals which in crossing and recrossing in their turn, will end, if the dogs live in a free state, in forming one single specie. Sexual liberty tends to establish uniformity of type; monogamy strives against this tendency and maintains diversity.[1]Another consequence of this manner of seeing is that one must consider monogamy as favourable to intellectual development, intelligence being a differentiation which accomplishes itself more often, in proportion as there are individuals and groups who differ physically. Physical uniformity engenders uniformity of sensibility, thence of intelligence; this does not need to be explained; now intelligences count, and mark only their differences; uniform, they are as if they were not; impotent to hook themselves one onto the other, to react against each other, lacking asperities, lacking contrary currents. This is the flock, in which each member makes the same gesture of flight, of biting, or of roaring.

Neither the conditions of absolute monogamy, nor those of absolute promiscuity seem to be found at present in humanity, nor among animals; but one sees the couple, in several animal and human species, either in state of tendency, or in state of habit. More often, especially among insects, the father, even if he survives it a little while, remains indifferent, to the consequences of the genital act. At other times, the fights between males so reduce their number that a sole male remains the master and servant of a great number of females. So one must distinguish between true, and successive polygamy; between the monogamy of one season, and that of an entire lifetime; and finally one must set apart those animals who make love only once, or during one season which is followed by death. These different varieties and nuances demand methodic classification. It would be a long work, and would perhaps not attain true exactitude, for in animals, as in man, one must count with caprice in sexual matters: when a faithful dove is tired of her lover, she takes flight, and soon forms a new couple with an adulterous male. The couple is natural, but the permanent couple is not. Man has never bent to it, save with difficulty, even though it be one of the principal conditions of his superiority.

The breasts of the male do not seem to prove the primordiality of the couple in mammals. Although there are veridic examples of the male's having given suck, it is difficult to consider the male udder as destined for a real rôle, or for an emergency milking.[2]This replacement has been too rarely observed for one to use it as a basis of argument. Embryology gives a good explanation of the existence of this useless organ. An useless instrument is, moreover, quite as frequent in nature as the absence of a useful instrument. Perfect concordance of organ and act is rare. In the case of insects who live but for one love-season, sometimes for two real seasons if they can benumb themselves for the winter, polygamy is nearly always the consequence of the rarity of males, or the superabundance of females. Space is too vast, their food too abundant for there to be truly deadly combats between males. Moreover, their love accomplished, the minuscule folk ask only to die, the couple is formed only for the actual time of fecundation, the two animals at once resume their liberty, that is for the female to deliver her eggs, and for the male to languish, and sometimes to cast a final song to the winds. There are exceptions to this rule, but if one looks upon the exceptions with the same gaze as on the rule, one would see in nature only what one sees on the surface of a river, vague movements and passing shadows. To conceive some reality, one must conceive a rule, first, as an instrument of vision and of measure. With most insects the male does nothing but live; he deposits his seed in the female receptacle, flies on, vanishes. He does not share any of the labours preparatory to laying. Alone the female sphex engages in her terrible and clever strife with the cricket, whom she paralyzes with three stabs of her dagger in his three moto-nervous centres; alone she hollows the oblique burrow at the bottom of which live her larvæ; alone she adorns it, fills it with provisions, closes it. Alone the female cerceris heaps up in the deep gallery the stunned weevils and burn-cows, fruit of her excavations, larder for her progeny. Alone the she-osmie, she-wasp, she-philanthe—one would have to cite nearly all the hymenoptera. One understands better, when the insect deposits her eggs by chance, without prefatory manœuvres, or by special instruments, that the male co-operation is lacking; only the female cicada can sink her clever burrow in the olive bark.

There are however couples among insects. Among coleoptera there are the "purse-maker," the necrophore. Stercorian geotrupes, lunar copris, onitis bison, sisyphus, work soberly side by side preparing the larder for their coming families. In these cases, the male seems master, he directs the manœuvres in the complicated operations of the necrophores. A couple get busy about a corpse, say of a field mouse; nearly always one or two isolated males join them, the troop is organized, one sees the chief engineer explore the territory and give orders. The female awaits them, motionless, ready to obey, to follow the movement. As soon as there is a couple the male necrophore commands. The male assists the female during the work of arranging the cell and the laying. Most purse-makers, sisyphus or copris make and transport together the pill which serves as food for the larvæ; their couple is just like that of birds. One might believe that in this case monogamy is necessitated by the nature of the work; not at all: the male in other quite closely related species, sacred scarab, for example, leaves the female alone to build the excremental ball in which she encloses her eggs.

Coming up to vertebrata one finds also certain examples of a sort of monogamy: when the male fish serves as hatcher for his own eggs, either carrying them in a special pouch, or heroicly sheltering them in his mouth. This is rare, since, usually, the two sexes of fish do not approach each other, do not even know each other. Batrachians, on the contrary, are monogamous; the female does not lay save under male pressure, and it is so slow an operation, preceded by such long manœuvres that the whole season is filled with it. The male of the common land toad rolls the long chaplet of eggs about his feet as soon as it is divided, and goes in the evening to place it in the neighbouring pool. Nearly all saurians seem also to be monogamous. The he and she lizard form a couple said to last several years. Their amours are ardent, they clasp each other closely belly to belly.

Birds are generally considered monogamous, save gallinaceæ and web-footed birds; but exceptions appear so numerous that one would have to name the species one by one. The fidelity of pigeons is legendary, and is perhaps only a legend. The male pigeon certainly has tendencies to infidelity and even to polygamy. He deceives his companion; he goes so far as to inflict upon her the shame of having a concubine under the conjugal roof! And these two spouses, he tyrannizes over them, he enslaves them by beating. The female, it is true, is not always of an easy disposition. She has her caprices. Sometimes, refusing her mate, she deserts him and gives herself to the first comer. One will not find here any of the zoölogical anecdotes on the industry of birds, their union in devotion to the specie. The habits of these new-comers in the world, are very unstable; yet among certain gallinaceæ, monogamous for exception, like the partridge, the males seem pulled by contrary desires, they undergo the couple rather than choose it, and their share in the rearing of young is often very slight. One has seen the male red partridge, after mating, abandon his female and rejoin a troop of male vagabonds. The nightingales, perfect pair, sit on the eggs turn by turn. The male, when the female comes to relieve him, remains near by and sings until she is comfortably settled on the eggs. Still more devoted is the male talegalle, a sort of Australian turkey. He makes the nest, an enormous heap of dead leaves; when the female has laid, he watches the eggs, comes from time to time to uncover them for exposure to the sun. He takes his share of watching the young, sheltering them under leaves until they are able to fly.

Of mammals, the carnivora and rodents often practice a certain, at least temporary, monogamy. Foxes live in couples, and educate the young foxes. One finds their real habits in the old "Roman du Renart": Renard the fox goes vagabond, hunting for prey and windfalls, while Madame Hermaline, his wife, waits at home, in her bower at Maupertuis. The vixen teaches her children the art of killing and dividing; their apprenticeship is made on the still living game which the male purveyor has brought to the house. The rabbit is very rough in love; the hamster, another rodent, often becomes carnivorous during the rutting season; they say that he is quite ready to eat his young, and that the female, fearing his ferocity, leaves him before delivery. These aberrations are exaggerated in captivity, and affect even the female. One knows that the she-rabbit sometimes eats her young; this happens especially when one has the imprudence to touch or even to look too closely at the young rabbits. This is enough to bring on a violent disturbance of maternal sentiment. The same dementia has been observed in a vixen who had kittened in a cage; one day someone passed, and looked steadily at the young foxes, a quarter of an hour later they were throttled.

Various explanations are given for this practice among she-rabbits, the simplest being that they are driven by thirst to kill the young in order to drink the blood. This is rather Dantescan for she-rabbits. They say also, regarding both wild and tame rabbits, that the female when surprised kills the young because she has not industry like the doe-hare, cat, or bitch, to transport them to some other place or to save at least one, by the scruff of its neck. The third explanation is that, devouring the afterbirth, like nearly all mammals, and this from physiological motive, the doe-rabbit acquires a taste, and continues the meal, absorbing the young as well. Without rejecting any of these explanations one may present several others. First, it is not only the females who eat the young, the males are equally given to it. Being very lascivious, the male rabbit tries to get rid of his young, in order to stop suckling, and have his female again. On the other hand, it is a regular fact, that as soon as she has retaken the habit of having the male, the mother rabbit, even if she is still giving suck, at once ceases to recognize her offspring, her brief ideas already turned toward her new, coming family. Different causes may engender identical acts, and different lines of reasoning bring the same conclusions. There is reasoning in this case of the rabbit; there is no reasoning save in case of initial error, when there is trouble in the intellect. This trouble and the final massacre is all that one can state definitely: the reasoning escapes our analysis.

Is the rabbit really monogamous? Perhaps, with a monogamy for the season, or from necessity. The male, in any case pays no attention to the young, unless it be to throttle them; thus the female as soon as she is gravid, takes refuge in an isolated burrow. Their coupling, which occurs especially toward evening, is repeated as often as five or six times an hour, the female crouching in a particular manner; the break away is very sudden, the male throwing himself back, sidewise and uttering a short cry. What really makes one doubt the monogamy of the rabbit is that one male is enough for eight or ten females, that he is a great runner, that the males have murderous fights among themselves. Doubtless one must take each specie separately. Buffon pretends that in a warren the oldest buck rabbits have authority over the young. An observer of rabbit habits, M. Mariot-Didieux, admits this trait of superior sociability in angoras, which is just the specie Buffon had studied.

Buck rabbits have still other aberrations, hunters pretend that they pursue doe-hares, tire them and wear them out by their lustiness; it is certain that these couplings give no result.

The Egyptian ichneumon lives in families. It seems that it is very interesting to see them on a hunting expedition, first the male, then the female, then the young in Indian file. Female and young do not take their eyes off father, and imitate all his gestures with care: one might think the train was a large serpent moving in reeds. The wolf who like the fox lives in pairs, helps his female and feeds her, but he does not know his young and will eat them if they come to hand. Certain great apes, gibbon and orang are temporarily monogamous.

Polygamy would be explained by the rarity of males; which is not the case with most mammals, among whom the males are almost constantly more numerous. Buffon was the first to note this predominance, neither has he nor has anyone since, given a satisfactory explanation. People have said that in man, at least, the elder parent gives the sex to the offspring, and the more surely as the difference in age is greater, but, by this reckoning one would have almost nothing but males. People have also said that the younger the woman, the more likely the child to be male. The early marriages of the past are supposed to have yielded more males than the late marriages of the present. None of these statements is serious. What remains past doubt is that European humanity, to consider only that, gives an excess of males. The general average is about 105, with extremes of 101 in Russia, and 113 in Greece; the French average is the same as the general average. One has not been able to make out, in these variations, either influence of race, or of climate, or of taxes, or of nationality, or anything else in particular. There are more male humans, more male sheep: it is a fact, which being regular, will be difficult to explain.

We find here superabundance, there penury of males, but neither does the abundance determine the customs, nor is it likely the lack of males would do so. There are so few males among gnats that Fabre was the first to recognize them, the proportion about one male to ten females. This in no way produces polygamy, for the male dies the instant after coupling. Nine out of ten gnat females die virgin, and even without having seen a male, without knowing that males exist: perhaps celibacy augments their ferocity, for it is the female gnat and she alone who sucks our gore. One supposes also that female spiders outnumber the males ten or twenty to one: perhaps the buck who has escaped the jaws of one mistress has the courage to risk his life yet again? It is possible, the male spider who survives his amours may live on for several years. Polygamy seems to exist, and in its most refined form, with one sort of spider, the ctenize, whose males are peculiarly rare. The female digs a nest in the earth, into which the male descends; he lives there some time, then he leaves, comes back: there are several houses between which he divides his time equitably.

The polygamy of a curious little fish, the stickleback, is of the same sort, although more naive. The male builds a grass nest, then goes in search of a female, brings her back to the nest, invites her to lay; scarcely has his first companion departed when he brings in another. He only stops when there is a satisfactory treasure of eggs, then he fecundates them in the usual manner. Thence on he guards the nest against malefactors, and watches the hatching. In the odd reversal of rôles, the young recognize their father; their mother may be the fish passing between them, or the one gliding off like a shadow, or the one chewing a grass blade. When the stickleback world becomes reasonable, that is to say absurd, it will perhaps give itself up to the "recherche de la maternité"? Their philosophers will demand "Why should the father alone be charged with the education of his offspring?" Up to the present one knows nothing except that he educates them with joy and affection. Among sticklebacks and among men there is no answer to such question save the answer given by facts. One might as well ask why humanity is not hermaphrodite, like the snails, who strictly divide the pleasures and burdens of love, for all snails commit the male act, and all lay. Why has the female ovaries, and the male testicles: and this flower pistils, and this one stamens? One ends in baby-talk. The wish to correct nature is unnecessary. It is hard enough to understand her, even a little, as she is. When she wishes to establish the absolute responsibility of the father, she establishes the strict couple, and especially, absolute polygamy. The pigeon is no longer certain of being the father of his young; the cock can not doubt it, he being the sole male among all his hens. But nature has no secondary intentions, she keeps watch that, temporary or durable, fugitive or permanent the couples are fecund; that is all.

Gallinaceæ and web-feet present certain birds best known and most useful to us. They are nearly all polygamous. The cock needs about a dozen hens, he can do with a much larger number, but in that case his ardour wears itself out. The duck, very licentious, is accused of sodomy. Not only is he polygamous, but anything will serve him. He might better be a natural example of promiscuity. A gander is good for ten or twelve geese, the cock-pheasant for eight or ten hens. The lyrure tetras needs many more, he leads a sultan's harem behind him. At dawn, in the season of amours, the male starts whistling with a noise like steel on a grindstone, simultaneously stretching himself up, and spreading the fan of his tail, opening and puffing his wings. When the sun clears the horizon he rejoins his females, dances before them, while they devour him with their eyes, then he mounts them, according to his caprice, and with great vivacity.

Polygamy is the rule among herbivora; bulls, bucks, stallions, bison are made to reign over a troop of females. Domesticity changes their permanent polygamy into successive polygamy. Stags go from female to female without tying up to any; the females follow this example. A specie immediately akin gives, on the contrary, an example of the couple; the roebuck and his doe live in family, and bring up their young until these are ready to mate. The male of a certain Asian antelope needs more than a hundred docile females. Naturally, these harems can only be formed by the destruction of other males. This hundred females represents possibly more than a hundred males put out of business, males being always the more numerous sex, among mammals. The utility of such hecatombs to the race is not certain. Doubtless one may suppose that the surviving male is the strongest, or one of the strongest of his generation, that is the lucky element, but whatever his vigour it may be expected to wane at some point or other before a hundred females desiring satisfaction. Some females are forgotten, others fecundated in moments of weariness: for a certain number of good products, there are a number of mediocre creations. True, these are destined, if male, to perish in future combats; but if they are female, and if they receive the favours of the chief, this system might have for consequence the progressive degradation of the specie. It is however, probable that the necessary equilibrium is re-established; combats between females, combats of coquetry, incitements of femininity, doubtless take place, and it is the triumph of the malest male and of the most female females.

Virey asserts, in Déterville's "Nouveau dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle," that the greater polygamous apes get on very well with women indigenes. It is possible, but no product has ever been born of these aberrations, which we must leave to theological works on bestialitas. Men and women, even of the Aryan race have at times set out to prove the radical animality of the human specie by the peculiarity of their tastes. The interest in these matters is chiefly psychological, and if one can draw no proof of evolution from the chance relations between woman and dog, man and goat, the coupling of primates of different orders offers no evidence either. There is however a relation between man and apes, it is that they are both divisible into polygamists and monogamists, at least temporary; but this does not differentiate them from most other animal species.

In most human races there is a radical polygamy, dissimulated under a show-front of monogamy. Here generalizations are no longer possible, the individual emerges and with his fantasy upsets all observations, and annihilates all statistics. The monogamist's brother is polygamous. A woman has known only one man, and her mother was every one's fancy. One may assert the universal custom of marriage and deduce monogamy as a conclusion, and this will be false or true according to the epoch, milieu, race, moral tendencies of the moment. Moral codes are essentially unstable, since they represent only a hand-book ideal of happiness; morality will modify itself according to the mobility of this ideal.

Physiologically, monogamy is in no way required by the normal conditions of human life. Children? If the father's help is necessary it can be exercised over the children of several women as well as over those of one woman only. The duration of tutelage among civilized people is, moreover, excessive; it is dragged out, when it is a matter of certain careers, almost until ripe age. Normally puberty ought to liberate the young human, as it liberates the young of other mammals. The couple need then last only ten or fifteen years; but female fecundity accumulates children at a year's interval, so that, as long as the father's virility lasts, there might be, always one feeble creature having right to demand protection. Human polygamy could then, never be successive polygamy, save by exception, that is, if man were an obedient animal, submitting to normal sexual rules, and always fecund; but this successivity is frequent and divorce has legalized it. The other and true polygamy, polygamy actual, temporary or permanent, is still less rare among people of European civilization, but nearly always secret and never legal; it has for corollary a polyandry exercised under the same conditions. This sort of polygamy is very different from that of Mormons, Turks, gallinaceæ and antelopes, it is nothing more than promiscuity. It does not dissolve the couple, in diminishing its tyranny it renders it more desirable. Nothing so favours marriage, and consequently, social stability, as the de facto indulgence in temporary polygamy. The Romans well understood this, and legalized concubinage. One can not here deal with a question so remote from, natural questions. To condense one's answer into briefest possible space, one would say that man, and principally civilized man, is vowed to the couple, but he only endures it on condition that he may leave and return to it at will. This solution seems to conciliate his contradictory tastes, and is more elegant than the one offered by divorce, which is always the same thing over again; it is in conformity not only with human, but also with animal tendencies. It is favourable to the species, in assuring the suitable up-bringing of children, and also to the complete satisfaction of a need, which, in a state of civilization is inseparable either from æsthetic pleasure or sentimental pleasure.

[1]That is to say in the eye of some imaginary divinity who might be supposed to regard humanity, or even the slower mammals from a timeless or say five century altitude.—Translator's note.

[2]One believes nevertheless that the male bat suckles one of the two young that the couple regularly produces. But these animals are so odd and so heteroclite that this example, if it is authentic, would not be a decisive argument.

Organization of reproduction among hymenoptera.—Bees.—Wedding of the queen.—Mother bee, cause and consciousness of the hive.—Sexual royalty.—Limits of intelligence among bees.—Natural logic and human logic.—Wasps.—Bumble-bees.—Ants.—Notes on their habits.—Very advanced state of their civilization.—Slavery and parasitism among ants.—Termites.—The nine principal active forms of termites.—Great age of their civilization.—Beavers.—Tendency of industrious animals to inactivity.

Social hymenoptera, bumble-bees, hornets, wasps, bees, have peculiar love customs very different from those of other animal species. It is not monogamy, since one finds in it nothing resembling the couple, nor polygamy, since the males know only one female, when they have even that adventure, and since the females are fecundated for the whole of their life by a single fecundation. It is, rather, a sort of matriarchate, even though the queen bee is not generally the mother of more than a part of the hive whereover she rules, the other part having sprung from the queen who has gone off with the new swarm, or from the one who has remained in the former hive. In very numerous hives there are about six or seven hundred males to one female. Copulation takes place in the air; as is the case with ants, it is only possible after a long flight has filled with air the pouches which cause the male's organ to emerge. Between these pockets, or aëriferous bladders shaped like perforated horns, emerges the penis, a small white body, plump and bent back at the point. In the vagina, which is round, wide and shallow, the sperm-pouch opens; it is a reservoir which can contain they say, a score of million of spermatozoides, destined to fecundate the eggs, during several years in proportion as they are to be laid. The form of the penis and the manner in which the sperm is coagulated by a viscous liquid into a veritable spermatophore, cause the death of the male. The copulation ended, he wishes to disengage himself but only manages to do so in leaving in the vagina not only the penis but all the organs attached to it. He falls like an empty bag, while the queen, returned to the hive, stops at the entrance, makes her toilet, aided by the workers who crowd about her: with her mandibles she gently removes the spine which has remained in her belly, and cleans the place with lustral attention. Then she enters the second period of her life: maternity. This penis which remains fast in the vagina makes one think of the darts of fighters which also remain in the wound; be it love or war the over-courageous beastlet expires, worn out and mutilated; there is in this a peculiar facility of dehiscence which seems very rare.

The wedding of the queen bee remained a long time absolutely mysterious, and even today there are only a very few observers who have been the distant witnesses of it. Réaumur, having isolated a queen and a male, witnessed a play or combat with movements which he interpreted with ingenuity. He could not see the actual coupling, which only takes place in the air. His story, is unique and nothing since has confirmed it. He shows us a queen approaching a male, sucking him with her proboscis, offering him honey, stroking him with her feet, and finally irritated by the coldness of her suitor, mounting his back, applying her vulva to the male organ, which Réaumur describes very well ("Memoirs," tome V) and which he represents as covered with a white viscous liquid. The real preludes, at least in a state of liberty, contradict the great observer. The female seems in no way aggressive. Here are the three authentic accounts I have been able to discover:

"6th July, 1849, M. Hannemann, bee-keeper at Wurtemburg, Thuringia was seated near my hive when his attention was aroused by an unaccustomed buzzing. Suddenly he saw thirty or forty drones" (i.e., false drones, male bees) "rapidly pursuing a queen-bee, about twenty or thirty feet up in the air. The group filled a space about two feet in diameter. Sometimes, in their flight, they came as low as ten feet from the ground, then rose, flying north to south. He followed them about a hundred yards, then a building interrupted him. The group of drones formed a sort of cone with the queen at the summit, then the cone enlarged into a globe of which she was the centre: at this moment the queen succeeded in getting away and rose vertically, still followed by the drones who had reformed the cone under her."[1]

"Some years later the Rev. Millette, at Witemarsh, observed the final phase of the act. During a hiving, he noticed a flying queen, who an instant later, was stopped by a male. After having flown about a rod they fell to the ground hooked to each other. He approached and captured them both, at the very moment when the male had abandoned himself to the embrace; he carried them to the house and let them loose in a closed room. The queen, angry, flew toward the window; the male after dragging himself for an instant across the open palm of the observer's hand, fell to floor and died. Both male and female had at the tip of the abdomen drops of a milky white liquid; by squeezing the male, he saw that the male had lost his genital organs." (Farmer and Gardener, 1859.)

"Having seen the queen go out, M. Carrey closed the entrance of the hive. During his absence, which lasted a quarter of an hour, three false-drones came to the entrance and finding it closed, continued flying. When the queen on her return was only about three feet from the hive, one of the drones flew very rapidly toward her, throwing his legs around her body. They stopped, resting on a long grass-blade. Then an explosion was distinctly heard, and they separated. The drone fell to the ground quite dead, with abdomen much contracted. After a few circles in the air, the mother entered the hive." (Copulation of the mother bee, in l'Apiculteur, 6e année, 1862.)

Save the remark about the final explosion, these three accounts accord well enough, and give an exact idea of one of the couplings most difficult to get sight of.

It is, moreover, the one half-obscure point in bee life. One knows all the rest, their three sexes, rigorously specialized, the precise industry of the wax-workers, the diligence of the collectresses, the political sense of these extraordinary amazons, their initiatives, when the hive is too full, their starts for the formation of new swarms, the duels of queens where the populace intervene, the massacre of males as soon as they are useless, the nurse's art in transforming a vulgar larva into the larva of a queen, the methodical activity of these republics where all wills, united in a single conscience, have no other aim but the common well-being and the conservation of the race. It is however these over-mechanical virtues which constitute the inferiority of the bee; the workers are extremely laborious and well-behaved, but they lack even that slight personality which characterizes sexed insects. The much less reasonable queen is more living, she is capable of jealousy, rage, of despair when she feels her royalty menaced by the new queen whom the nurses have bred up in secret. Even the useless, noisy, pillaging, parasitic males, drunk and swollen with vain sperm are more attractive than the honest workers, and handsomer also, stronger, more slender, more elegant. Bee-lovers generally despise these musketeers, yet it is they who incarnate the animality, that is to say the beauty of the specie. If it is true as M. Maeterlinck believes (La Vie des Abeilles), that the most vigorous of seven or eight hundred males finally seduces the royal virgin, then their laziness, their greediness, their giddy staggering are but so many virtues.

It seems that the queen and even the workers can without fecundation lay eggs which will hatch into males; but copulation is necessary in order to produce females and queens; now as only the queen can receive the male, a hive without a queen is doomed. That is the practical point of view, the sexual point of view leads to other reflections. A female can, quite alone, give birth to a male: but to have an egg hatch female, it must be fecundated by a male born spontaneously: one observes here the real exteriorization of the male organ, a segmentation of the genital power, into two forces, the male force and the female. Thus disunited, it acquires a new faculty which will fully unfold itself by the reintegration of the two halves of the initial force into a single force. But why do the virgin-born ovules necessarily give birth to males, among bees, and to females among plant lice? That is the question defying answer. All that one sees is that parthenogenesis is always transitory, and that after a number of virginal generations, normal fecundation always intervenes.

One can not say that the mother bee is a true queen, a veritable chief, but she is the important personage in the hive, the one without whom life stops. The workers have the air of being mistresses; in reality their nervous centre is in the queen; they act only for her, and by her. Her disappearance sets the hive crazy, and drives it to absurd endeavours, such as the transformation of a nurse into a layer, though she will give eggs of one sex only, so many useless mouths. In reflecting on this last expedient one can measure the importance of sex, and understand the absolutism of its royalty. Sex is king, and there is no royalty save the sexual. The making neuter of the workers, which sets them out of norm, if it is a cause of order in the hive, is above all a cause of death. There are no living creatures save those who can perpetuate life.

The interest offered by bees is very great, but does not pass that offered by the observation of most hymenoptera, social or solitary, or of certain neuroptera, such as termites; or even by beavers, and many birds. But bees have been through many ages our sugar-producers, and they alone; hence man's tenderness for insects more valuable than all others to him. Their intelligence is well developed, but soon shows its limitations. People pretend that bees know their master, a manifest error. The relations of bees and man are purely human. It is evident that they are as ignorant of man as are all the other insects, and all other invertebrata. They allow themselves to be exploited, in the sense of their instinct, to the limit of famine and muscular exhaustion. Virgil's phrase is excessively true, in all the senses one wishes to take:Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes. (Bees making honey not for yourselves.) These clever, witty creatures are fooled by the gross fakes of our industrial cunning. When they have stacked their winter's provisions, honey, into their wax combs, one removes the honeycombs, and replaces them by sockets of varnished paper: and the solemn bees, set themselves to forgetting their long labours; before these virgin combs, they have but one idea: to fill them. They restart work with a bustle which would excite veritable pity in any man but a bee-keeper. These commercials have invented a hive with moveable combs. The bees will never know. Bees are stupid.

But we who see the limits of intelligence in bees, should consider the limits of our own. There are limits; it is possible to conceive brains who observing us, would say: men are stupid. All intelligence is limited; it is just this shock against the limit, against the wall, which by the pain it causes, engenders consciousness. We are not to laugh too much at the bees who gaily furnish the mobile combs of their improved hives. We are perhaps the slaves of a master who exploits us, and who will remain forever unknown. The polygamy, or if one wish, the polyandry of bees, pretext for this digression, is then purely virtual; it is in the state of possibility, but it will never be realized, since the fecundity of the queen is assured by a single act. The excessive multiplicity of males corresponds doubtless to an ancient order in which the females were more numerous. In any case only two or three males out of about a thousand, are used, or let us say ten, if you wish to suppose very frequent swarming, this demonstrates that one must not prejudge the habits of an animal specie by the overabundance of one sex or another, and that, in a general fashion, one must place natural logic above our human logic, derived from mathematical logic. Facts in nature are connected by a thousand knots of which no one is solvable by human logic. When one of these tangles is unravelled before our eyes we marvel at the simplicity of its mechanism, we think we understand, we make generalities, we prepare to open neighbouring mysteries with the same key: illusion. One always has to begin again at the start. Thus the sciences of observation become increasingly obscure as one penetrates further into the labyrinth.

Among wasps and hornets there is nothing resembling polygamy, even potentially. A fecundated female after passing the winter, constructs, by herself, the first foundations of a nest, lays the eggs, from which sexless individuals are born; these workers then assume all material labours, finish the nest, watch the larvæ which the female continues to produce. These are now males and females: after coupling the males die, then the workers, the females become languid, those who survive will found as many new tribes.

The generation of bumble-bees is more curious, the differentiation of castes more complicated. There are among them, males, workers, small females, great females. A great female, having passed the winter, founds a nest in the earth, often in moss (there is a sort called the moss bee), she constructs a wax comb, lays. From the first eggs come workers who, as in wasps, construct the definitive nest, pillage, make honey, and being more industrious than the other sort of bees who fear dampness, they scour the country long after sunset. After the workers, the little females see light; they have no function save laying, without fecundation, the eggs which will hatch male. Simultaneously the queen produces great females who will soon couple with the males. Then, as with wasps, all the colony dies except the fecundated great females, by whom the cycle will recommence, the following spring.

There are three casts of ants, or four if one count, the division of neuters into workers and fighters, as among termites. Here, as with bees, the neuters are the base of the republic, the males die after mating, the females after laying. "There are," says M. Janet (Recherches sur l'anatomie de la fourmi) "workers so different from the others, in the development of their mandibles and the largeness of their heads that one calls them soldiers, a name according with the rôle they fill in the colony." These soldiers are also butchers, who cut up prey which is too large or dangerous. Specialization is the only superiority of the neuters who for the rest seem inferior to the females and to the males in size, muscling and visual organs. The females are sometimes half as large again as the neuters, the males being between the two sizes. The ant shows much more intelligence than the bee. Before this tiny people one seems really to touch humanity. Consider that the ants have slaves, and domestic animals. First the plant lice, preferably those who live on roots, and, at need, those of the rose-bush, who are milked, and who permit it, subjected by long heredity.Aphis formicarum vacca, says Linnæus briefly (beetle the ants' cow). But wandering herds are not enough for them, they keep in the interior of their ant-hills, colonies of slave plant-lice, of domesticated staphylins. The staphylins are small coleoptera with mobile abdomen, one of their species is only found among ants. They are domesticated to the point of no longer being able to feed themselves: the ants stuff the necessary food into their mouths. In return the staphylins furnish their masters a revenue analogous to that which they get from the plant-lice: from the bunch of hairs rising at the base of their abdomen they seem to exude a delectable liquor, at least one sees the ants suck these hairs with great eagerness. These animals permit it. They are so much at home, that the same observer (Muller, traduit par Brullé,dans le Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle de Guérin, au mot Pselaphiens) has seen them coupling without fear in the midst of the busy ant people, the male hunched on the back of the female, solidly crammed against the mellifluous tuft of ant's delicacies.

One knows that the red ants make war on the black ants and steal their nymphs, who, retained in captivity, make them excellent domestics, attentive and obedient. White humanity also, at one point in its history, found itself faced with a like opportunity, but less prudent than the red ant, it let it pass, from sentimentalism, thus betraying its destiny, renouncing, under Christian inspiration, the complete and logical development of its civilization. Is it not amusing that slavery is presented to us as anti-natural, when it is on the contrary, normal and excessively natural to the most intelligent of animals? And in an order of ideas more closely related to the subject of this book, if the making neuter of a part of the population, placing them in castes vowed to continence, is an anti-natural attempt, how is it that social hymenoptera, ants, bees, bumble-bees, and termites among neuroptera, have managed it so well, and have made it the basis of their social state? Doubtless there is nothing like it among animals; but mammals, apart from man, that monster, even including beavers, are infinitely inferior to insects. If the habits of social birds (for there are such) were better known, one might find analogous practices among them. The sexual co-operation of all the members of a people being useless so far as the conservation of the race is concerned; and on the other hand inferior species living as neighbours to a superior species being destined to disappear, slavery is good for the inferiors as it assures them perpetuity and a sort of evolution suited to their feebleness.

A little brown ant, the anergates, having no workers establishes itself as parasite in an ant-hill and gets itself served by workers of another species in order to live. What ingenuity of the sexed, what docility of the sexless! The worker ants are clearly degenerate females, among whom sexual sensibility has been completely transformed into maternal sensibility. One observes, moreover, in many species an intermediate type of woman-worker, who gives the key to this evolution. One should note that after fecundation the females do not all re-enter the city; where they fall, they build, as mother-bumble-bees, a provisory nest, acting then like workers, and await the first egg-laying, which will produce exclusively real workers and will thereby permit the normal construction of the new ant-hill.

There are among ants, as among butterflies, hermaphrodites along the medial line, or sometimes along an oblique line: this gives absurd creatures, half one thing, half the other, or singularities such as a female with a worker's had who functions as a worker.[2]

Polygamy by massacre of males, as among herbivora, and gallinaceæ seems a step toward a more logical and more economic distribution of the sexes. If antelopes perpetuate themselves very well with one male to an hundred females, is it not an indication that a part at least of the sacrificed males might have dispensed with being born? And would it not be better, in the interest of the antelopes, that a part of these males, if they ought to continue to be bora, should be normally sexless, as with termites, and entrusted with some social duty?

The organization of termites is very pretty; it will do to finish off this brief review of animal societies founded on the unsexing of sexes. One has already noted, in the chapters on dimorphism, the diversity of sexual forms, corresponding to four quite distinct castes. The minute examination of one of their republics permits one to assert differentiations much more numerous, for each of the principal castes passes through active larval and nymphal forms, adolescent forms, such as most neuroptera and libellules also present. In taking count of all the nuances one may observe in a state (to use the familiar word) of termites fifteen different forms, all with marked characteristics. The principal are: 1. Workers, 2. Soldiers, 3. Small males, 4. Small females, 5. Large males, 6. Large females, 7. Nymphs with little cases, 8. Nymphs with long cases, 9. Larvæ. When one attacks an ant hill, the soldiers arrive at the breach, very threatening, odd, with their bodies all head, all mandibles. The enemy routed, the workers come to repair the damage. There are sometimes several female egg-layers; sometimes there is only one male: copulation always takes place outside the hill, and as with ants, the males perish, while the fecundated females become the origin of a new state. The expeditions of travelling termites, common as fighting termites in South Africa, are naturally directed by soldiers. Sparmann (cited in Guérin's Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle) observed them during his voyage to the Cape, and says they behave rather as non-coms in close rank, or climbing onto grass blades, watch the defile, beating with their feet, if the order were bad, or too slow. The signal is at once understood, and obeyed by the rank at once, is answered by a whistle. There is in this something so marvellous that one hesitates to accept the traveller's interpretation in entirety. It is not the spontaneous and mechanical discipline of the ants, but the consenting obedience, so difficult to obtain from inferior humanities. After all, nothing is impossible, and without being credulous in these matters, one need be astonished at nothing. Nevroptera are, moreover, exceeding old on the earth; they date from before the coal-beds: their civilization is some thousands of centuries older than human civilizations.

Beavers are the only mammals, man excepted, whose industry indicates an intelligence near that of insects. But their societies offer no complication, they are a simple grouping of couples. They do not construct their dams until the females have been delivered, this happens toward the end of July, one sees no other connection between their sexual habits and their remarkable works.

These enormous trees felled and made to lie where intended, these piles stuck in the river-bed and interbound with twisted branches, these impermeable dams, all this hard and complicated work, the beaver accepts when pushed by necessity. He needs an artificial lake with unvarying depth; if he finds one made by nature, he accepts it, and limits himself to erecting his regular huts. Thus osmies, chalicodomes, or xylocopes,—or men, if they find by chance a nest prepared, hasten to profit by it. The instinct of construction is by no means blind; it is a faculty which will not be employed very often save in extremity: the present inhabitant of the Loire valley still arranges the caves for domestic use. To its injury, but of that it knows nothing, the bee profits by the artificial combs slid into its hive. The Rhone beaver has rested ever since men erected such excellent dams there. The fairy palace which rises in mid forest for the rubbing of a ring is the human, and animal, ideal.

I must dose these observations on natural societies, in pointing out that if they are today based on something quite different from polygamy, it seems likely that they were in origin societies either of polygamy or of sexual communism. If one starts from communism one will very soon evolve either toward the couple, or toward polygamy, if it is a matter of mammals; or toward sexual neutralization if it is a matter of insects. The couple, polygamy, neutralization are methods; sexual communism is not a method, and for that reason one must consider it as the chaos from which order has little by little emerged.

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