THE MECHANISM OF LOVE
_III. Of birds and fish.--Males without
penis.--Coupling by simple contact.--Salacity of
birds.--Copulation of batrachians: accoucheur
toad, aquatic toad, earth toad, pipa toad.--Fœtal
parasitism.--Chastity of fish.--Sexes separated in
love.--Onanistic fecundation.--Cephalopodes, the
spermatophore._
_III. Of birds and fish_. It is toward the middle of the second month
that the separation of the cloaca into two regions is marked in the
human foetus: a partition is formed which will absolutely isolate
the digestive channel from the uro-genital. The persistence of the
cloaca is not a sign of primitivity, since one finds it in selacians,
batrachians, reptiles, monotremes and birds. The uro-genital region of
marsupials and of several rodents is submitted to a single sphincter,
witness of original union.
The bird's cloaca is divided into three chambers, for the three
functions, the outer orifice being necessarily unique, by definition.
It is with this rudimentary apparatus that most birds turn to the
pleasures of love. The male being wholly deprived of any erectile
tissue, coition is by simple contact, a pressure, perhaps a rubbing;
displeasing as the comparison may be, it is a play analogous to
the mouth to mouth kiss, or, if one prefer, to the pressing of two
sapphists clasped vulva to vulva. Far from being a regression or a
stop, it is perhaps a progress, the male at least gaining in security
and vigour, being obliged to very little muscular development. The
salacity of certain birds is well known, and one does not see that the
absence of an exterior penis diminishes their ardour, or attenuates the
pleasure which they find in these succinct contacts. Perhaps the direct
genital pleasure is concentrated in a vascular papilla which swells a
little at the moment of the approaches; this is very rudimentary, often
unnoticeable but it seems to be an exciting organ, the producer of
pleasure. The male mounts the female, holds her with feet and beak, the
two cloaca are superposed, the sperm flows into the oviduct. One sees
sparrows repeat the sexual act as often as twenty times, always with
the same excitement, the same expression of contentment; the female
tires first, and shows her impatience. Birds' habits are especially
interesting in reason of the play with which they surround their love
making, their parades, their combats; we will deal with this in later
chapters.
Batrachians live for hardly anything save reproduction. Outside their
season of love, they remain stupefied. The rut over-excites them, and
these slow, frozen animals then show themselves ardent and implacable.
The males fight for the possession of females; having seized a female,
nothing will make the male let go. One has seen him stick to his post
even after his hind legs were cut off, even after losing half his
body. Yet the copulation is mere simulacrum, it takes place by simple
contact in the absence of exterior organs, even in salamanders, despite
the pads which surround the cloaca, sketch of an apparatus which has
remained extremely rudimentary, or possibly problematic. With anours,
the male, smaller than the female, climbs on her back, passes his
forefeet, his arms, under her armpits and remains skin to skin for a
month, for two months. At the end of this time the pressed flanks of
the female finally let fall the eggs, and he fecundates them as they
fall. Such is the coupling of frogs, lasting from fifteen to twenty
days. The male clambers onto the female, encircles her with his arms,
crosses his hands over her breast, and holds her tightly embraced.
He then remains immobile, in an ecstatic state, insensible to every
external shock, to every wound. It would seem that the sole aim of this
enlacing is to exercise a pressure on, or to cause an excitement in,
the belly of the female and to make her deliver her eggs. She lays a
thousand and the male sprays them with sperm as they pass.
All the anours (tailless batrachians) thus press their females like
lemons; but the method of fecundating the eggs is quite variable.
The mid-wife toad enlaced like the others, aids the emergence of the
egg garland with his hind feet, he unrolls it grain by grain, with
devotion, while the female, immobile emptier, lends herself willingly
to this manœuvre, which she feels perhaps as a caress. The aquatic
toad does not pull at the garland, he receives it in his paws, and when
he has ten eggs or so, he sprinkles them, ejaculating with a movement
of the flanks, which old Roesel[1] compares to that of a dog's in
coition. As for the common land toad, whose note sounds like a pure
crystal bell in calm of the evening, he waits until all the eggs have
emerged, he arranges them in a heap, then excited by somersaults, he
drenches the lot of them.
But no batrachian patience is as curious as that of the pipa toad.
This is a hideous beast with small eyes, mouth surrounded with
whisker-prickles, skin blackish green, full of warts and swellings. As
the eggs are laid the male fecundates them, then taking them in his
large webbed feet he spreads them out on the female's back. Around
each egg there forms a little protective pustule, in which the young
hatch. The female on whom a hatch commences offers the odd spectacle of
a back whence, here and there, heads and feet are sprouting, or from
which emerge little toads as if born of a paradox.[2] This formation
is another proof that nature finds anything good which happens to
attain her purpose, and that she cares only for the perpetuation of
life. An incubatorial pocket was necessary, and she had forgotten it;
no matter, the animal will make one for itself, at its own expense or
at the expense of some other specie. The small pipas exercize a real
parasitism, ordered by an absent-mindedness of nature. Whether the
deposit of eggs be in the mother's back or in the tissue of some other
animal the parasitism is no less evident, at most it is a question
of degree. From this point of view it will be possible to consider
the normal, internal evolution of sexual products as a parasitic
evolution: the young of the mammal is a parasite of its mother, as the
little ichneumon is a parasite of the caterpillar which serves it as
uterus. Thus considered the notion of parasitism temporary or larval
will disappear, or, rather, take a much greater extension, enveloping
a considerable number of facts up till now separated in irreducible
categories.
Fecundation by contact is very rare in fish, other than selacians.
One hardly finds it save in lophobranchi and certain other viviparous
fish, such as the blenny; the milt penetrates the female organs without
copulation, and the eggs develop either in these organs, or in a pouch
which the male carries under his belly, or even in the male's mouth,
he having thus the virtue of assuring the birth of his offspring. The
lophobranchi are wholly singular fish, one of them, the sea-horse,
horse-headed ludion, gives a good idea of the family. Ordinary fish,
such as one knows and eats, however M. de Lacépède may have classified
them, are chaste animals void of all erotic fantasy.
What would appear to be the essential of pleasure is unknown to them.
The males do not know possession nor the females surrender, no touch,
no rubbings, no caress. The object of male desire is not the female but
the eggs, he watches for those she is about to lay, he searches for
those she has laid, an excitement quite like those produced by onanism,
or which are engendered by fetishism in certain distorted minds and
which operate at the sight of a slipper or ribbon, and die down, even
to frigidity in the presence of the woman herself. The fish spends his
semen on eggs which he finds floating and whose mother he has never
seen. Often both eggs and male milt are left floating and meet only in
the chance of current and wave. Sometimes fish form a separate couple.
The female swims up stream, stops over a grass or sand bottom, the male
follows, obeying her gesture. Such habits have permitted people to
breed fish with as great a certainty as they breed mushrooms, or more
so. One takes a female swelled with eggs, squeezes her like an orange,
then one empties a male of his milt, and nature takes charge of the
rest. This procedure is not possible with certain species which act in
concert, the male tilted onto his back, his genital orifice beneath
that of the female, and ejaculating in time with her.
One knows that salmon swim up rivers in troops, often very dense,
and into the branch streams and creeks, to lay their spawn in quiet,
favorable nooks. Then they go down stream worn out by the dams and
waterfalls which they have mounted by tail-swishing, and tired by their
genital exercises. The column is often led by a female, the other
females follow. Then swim the old males and lastly the young males.
When the leaderess has found a suitable place, one of the roes stops,
hollows the sand with her belly, leaves a packet of eggs in the hole,
an old male drenches them at once, but the patriarch has been followed
by young bucks who imitate him and fecundate the same eggs. Thus, with
these fish there is a sort of school where the experienced teach the
newcomers the procedure of fecundation. This mixture of eggs and semen
from fish of all ages should be very favourable to the maintenance of
a specific type, if the instability of milieu did not bring about the
encounter of elements belonging to different neighbouring varieties:
despite the good will of naturalists, salmon and trout form practically
only one family, and nothing is more difficult, for example, than to
determine the specie of a young salmon, or to state the difference
between a salmon and a sea trout.
The loves of fish (and also of echinoderms, star-fish, sea-anemones,
etc.) thus reduce themselves, in the main, to those of ovule and
spermatozoide. The essential. But such simplification is rather
shocking to the sensibility of a superior vertebrate, or to an insect
accustomed to the amorous parade, to multiple and prolonged contacts,
to the presence and complexity of the opposite sex. This fashion of
love is, admittedly, not unknown to men, but they seem to be led to
it rather by necessity than by taste, by morals rather than by the
search for the maximum pleasure. Genital satisfactions obtained apart
from contact, apart from being necessarily infecund, save in scabrous
scientific experiments, often cause a nervous and muscular depression
greater even than excess committed in common. But this result is not
so evident that one can convert it into a moral principle, and the
fact remains that onanism, carefully considered, is one among nature's
gestures. A different conclusion would be more agreeable; but millions
of creatures would protest, from all the oceans, and from beneath the
reeds of all rivers. One might go further, and insinuate that this
method which appears to us monstrous, or, since it is a matter of fish,
singular, is perhaps superior to the laborious method of cavalage, so
ugly, in general, and so inconvenient. But there is not in terrestrial
nature, any more than in conceivable nature a high and low, a wrong
side and a right side; there is neither a good nor evil manner, a
right nor a wrong, but there are states of life which fulfill their
purpose, since they exist and since existence is their aim. Doubtless
the discord between the will and the organs is constant in all stages
of life, and much accentuated in man where the wishes are multiplex,
but where the nervous system remains, in short, the master, and governs
even to the danger of its life. It is not the chance of circumstances
and of milieu that has swelled the spermoduct of certain fish into
papilla, and then into penis, or formed a sheath for this penis at the
expense of the caudal fin; it is the will force of cerebral ganglia.
The evolution of the nervous system is always in advance of that of
the organs, this is a cause of incoherence, and at the same time, of
progress and change. The day when the brain has no more orders to give,
or when the organs have exhausted their faculties of obedience, the
specie is fixed; if fixed in a state of incoherence it moves toward
certain extinction, as the monotremes. Many species seem to have been
destroyed in full evolution by the contradictory exigencies of a
tyrannous and capricious nervous system.
It is necessary that the male cephalopode fecundate the female. How
will he do it, having no organic sperm-vector? He will make one. One
thought for a long time that the female argonauts were preyed on by
a parasite. This mysterious beast is nothing but the instrument of
fecundation. The male has a pouch where sperm accumulates; in this
pouch are made up little bags called spermatophores, the animalculæ
move toward the third arm of the argonaut (nautilus), and this arm
enlarges in spatula, equips itself with a scourge, loses its suckers,
and then when heavy with life as a ripe grape, it falls off, moves
toward the female, comes alongside her belly, lodges in the palleal
cavity and oozes out its seed into the organs where this will encounter
the ovules. The male organ, here, appears as a temporary individual, a
third being between father and mother, a messenger which carries the
male genital treasure to the female. Neither of them knows the other.
The male is wholly ignorant of the female for whom he detaches a limb,
and the female knows nothing of her fecundator save the sole organ
which fecundates. A little more complicated than that of the fish,
this method is probably older, and seems possible only for aquatic
animals. It is nevertheless that of many vegetables; this swimming
arm recalls the winged grains of pollen which travel far from their
pistils. Very few flowers can fecundate directly; nearly all have need
of an intermediary, the wind, an insect, a bird. Nature had given wings
to the phallus, ages before the imagination of Pompeian painters; she
had thought of this, not for the pleasure of bashful women, but for
the satisfaction of the most hideous beasts that people the ocean,
cuttlefish, calamaries, octopi.
[1] In his "Historia Naturalis Ranarum," 1758, Bufo aquaticus.
[2] The back as gestative chamber is also found in woodlice, during
one of their parthenogenetic phases, cf. Fabre "Souvenirs" VII, _les
Pucerons du terebinthe_.