tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">XV. THE SEXUAL PARADE

Universality of the caress, of amorous preludes.—Their rôle in fecundation.—Sexual games of birds.—How cantharides caress.—Males' combats.—Pretended combats of birds.—Dance of the tetras.—Gardener bird.—His country house.—His taste for flowers.—Reflections on the origin of his art.—Combats of crickets.—Parade of butterflies.—Sexual sense of orientation.—The great-peacock moth.—Animals' submission to orders of Nature.—Transmutation of physical values.—Rutting calendar.

XVI. POLYGAMY

Rarity of monogamy.—Taste for change in animals.—Rôles of monogamy and polygamy in the stability or instability of specific types.—Strife of the couple against polygamy.—Couples among insects.—Among fish, batrachians, saurians.—Monogamy of pigeons, of nightingales.—Monogamy in carnivora, in rodents.—Habits of the rabbit.—The ichneumon.—Unknown causes of polygamy.—Rarity and superabundance of males.—Polygamy in insects.—In fish.—In gallinaceæ, in web-footed birds.—In herbivora.—The antelope's harem.—Human polygamy.—How it tempera the couple among civilized races.

XVII. LOVE AMONG SOCIAL ANIMALS

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

XVIII. THE QUESTION OF ABERRATIONS

Two sorts of sexual aberration.—Sexual aberrations of animals.—Those of men.—Crossing of species.—Chastity.—Modesty.—Varieties and localizations of sexual bashfulness.—Artificial creation of modesty.—Sort of modesty natural to all females.—Cruelty.—Picture of carnage.—The cricket eaten alive.—Habits of carabes.—Every living creature is a prey.—Necessity to kill or to be killed.

XIX. INSTINCT

Instinct.—Can one oppose it to intelligence?—Instinct in man.—Primordiality of intelligence.—Instinct's conservative rôle.—Modifying rôle of intelligence.—Intelligence and consciousness.—Parity of animal and human instinct.—Mechanical character of the instinctive act.—Instinct modified by intelligence.—Habit of work creates useless work.—Objections to the identification of instinct and intelligence taken from life of insects.

XX. TYRANNY OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM

Accord and discord between organs and acts.—Tarses and sacred scarab.—The hand of man.—Mediocre fitness of sexual organs for copulation.—Origin of "luxuria."—The animal is a nervous system served by organs.—The organ does not determine the aptitude.—Man's hand inferior to his genius.—Substitution of one sense for another.—Union and rôle of the senses in love.—Man and animal under the tyranny of the nervous system.—Wear and tear of humanity compensated by² acquisitions.—Man's inheritors.

TRANSLATOR'S POSTSCRIPT

BIBLIOGRAPHY: PRACTICAL WORKS CONSULTED

THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE

CHAPTER I

THE SUBJECT OF AN IDEA

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

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

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

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

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

If insects and mammifers have any common ancestor, save the primordial jelly, there must indeed have been very different