SEXUAL DIMORPHISM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1]Bird, rather like quail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Hermaphrodism: mollusks, tuniciers, worms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In triviis quum sæpe canes discedere aventesDiversi cupidine summis ex viribus tendunt.—LUCRETIUS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whales who are by far the greatest mammals, obey a special rite, imposed by their lack of members and the element in which they live; the two colossi heave over on their sides like sprung ships, and join obliquely, belly to belly. The male organ is enormous, even in the state of rest, six or eight feet long and fifteen or sixteen inches in circumference. The vulva of the female is longitudinal; near it is found the udder which projects greatly when she gives suck. This udder has ejectory power, the whale cub hooks on by his lips, and the milk is sent to him as from a pump, marvellous accommodation of organs to the necessities of the milieu.

Anatomy forces female seals and walruses to turn over to receive the male. In the specie commonly called the sea-lion, she seems according to observations perhaps too sketchy, to make the advances. The male being stretched out at rest she rolls before him, plagues him, while he grumbles. She succeeds in moving him, and they go to play in the water. On return the female lies on her back, the male who is much thicker and longer covers her, propping himself on his arms. The coupling lasts seven or eight minutes. The posture of female seals is also that of hedgehogs, and truly the cavalage here must be particularly thorny. Despite his roof the male tortoise climbs onto the female and installs himself there, clinging to her shell with the nails of his forefeet; there he stays fifteen days having slowly introduced into her patient organs his long round prong, ending in a sort of pointed ball, pressing with all his strength the enormous clitoris of the female. We find ourselves far from mammifers and from the excitability of the bull; this coupling which lasts a whole season leads us toward the voluptuous laziness of disgusting and marvellous gasteropodes. According to tales which are, perhaps, not contradictory, crocodiles couple in the water, according to some, and on land according to others; in water laterally; on land, the female on her back. It is said to be the male who puts her on her back, and who, coition completed, helps her to right herself; charming spectacle, which I can not guarantee to be so, but which would improve our idea of the gallantry of these ancient divinities.

I don't know whether anyone has ever remarked that the caduceus of Mercury represents two serpents coupled. To describe the caduceus is to describe the love mechanism of ophidians. The bifurcated penis penetrates the vagina, the bodies interlace fold on fold while the two heads rise over the stiffened coils and look fixedly at each other, for a long time, eye gazing into eye.

Certain fish have penial organs; they can then realize true copulation; thus dog-fish, bounce, sharks, sea-hinds (biches). The males grip the females and hold them with hooks often formed at the expense of the abdominal fin, by cartilaginous pieces which penetrate the female orifice and serve as slide to the penis. The male skate seizes the female, turns her over, clamps himself to her, belly to belly, holds her with his penial tentacles and finishes the coupling, releasing his seed which flows into the cloaca. The operation is repeated several times; separated by the emission of skatelets who are born alive, it continues until the female has discharged the greater part of her eggs.

Back to Index Next