COURTSHIP, INSTINCT AND REASON
APART from the familiar instances of male colour-decoration afforded
by birds, we find that even some of the minute water-fleas inhabiting
freshwater lakes and the sea, and known as Crustacea Entomostraca, put
on a courting dress at the breeding season; that is to say, the males
become brilliantly coloured with patches of red and blue. And among
the highest mammals we find that the same colours are, in some cases,
displayed by the males as a fascination to the females. This is the
case with the males of some of the baboons, though not with those of
the highest man-like apes, who, like the primitive "savage" man, have
no decoration, no pretty seductive ways appealing to either the eye
or the ear, but rely on their strength and ferocity to overawe and
paralyze the female. In the male "mandrill" baboon the skin of the
sides of the great snout is of a deep blue colour, whilst the nose and
a tract behind it is wax-like and bright red. Not only that, but the
buttocks are brilliantly coloured, a central red area passing at the
sides through rich purple to pale blue. The animal, which is often
to be seen in menageries, is evidently proud of this finely-coloured
region of his body, and turns it to a visitor and remains quietly
posed, so that it may be well seen and duly admired. The hind-quarters
of other monkeys, both male and female, show a brilliant red colouring
during the mating season, and the skin and hair of the face is
variously coloured, so as to produce a decorative pattern (eyebrows,
moustache, beard, nose, all strongly contrasted in colour) in the
smaller monkeys, usually more strikingly in the males than in the
females. A brilliant emerald-green patch of colour is shown in the
hinder part of the body of the male in one species sometimes to be seen
at Regent's Park.
The making of sounds is a capacity possessed by many animals, small
and big. Often it seems to have no particular significance, but, as
in the case of the "humming" of bees and flies and the "droning" of
beetles, is the necessary accompaniment of the vibration of the wings.
But many animals make sounds as a "call," either to other individuals
of their species, irrespective of sex, or more definitely as signals
and appeals to the other sex, just as the luminosity which happens to
accompany certain necessary chemical activities in the bodies of the
lower animals has become specialized and utilized in the glow-worm
and other higher forms as a signal and appeal. The rubbing of rough
surfaces against one another is developed into a "stridulating organ"
which we find in crickets, locusts, scorpions, spiders, and even in
marine crustacea, and it is often specialized as a sexual appeal. The
mere production of sound by tapping against wood is used by the little
beetle, the death-watch, as a call, and is responded to by his mate
with similar tapping. Such "tapping" is developed into a remarkable
rhythmic vibrating sound by the birds called woodpeckers, and has its
significance in courtship. But it is chiefly by the inspiration and
expiration of air over vibrating cords or membranes called "vocal
organs" that animals produce distinctive and musical sounds. In most
cases such animals have a more general and simple "cry," which is not
necessarily a sexual appeal, but addressed to comrades generally, and
also a more elaborate cry or song which is primarily used by the male
as an attraction in courtship, but has in the case of many birds been
inherited from original male singers by the females also. The "singing"
of birds--apart from simpler cries and calls--is a sexual address, an
act of courtship. It is a display of power and capacity on the part of
the male, and that such is its character is shown by the competition
between male birds in the endeavour to "out-sing" one another. Some
birds become extraordinarily excited in these competitions, which take
the place of actual fighting, the victor who silences his opponents
being the winner of the female bird, who is at hand listening to the
competition. Caged chaffinches are celebrated for their eagerness to
compete with one another in singing. They deliver their little song
alternately until one is exhausted and unable to take up his turn. He
is vanquished. So excited do the birds become that it occasionally
happens that one of the competitors drops down dead. The beginning and
directive causes of the particular song of different kinds of birds
is not understood. But it is well known that they have a great gift
of imitation. Parrots, piping crows, ravens, and other such birds are
familiar instances, whilst little birds such as bullfinches can be
trained to whistle the melodies which human beings have invented. Even
the house-sparrow, which, though allied to singing finches, never sings
at all when in natural conditions, has been converted into a songster
by bringing it up in company with piping bullfinches.
Other animals which cannot sing like the birds yet use their voices in
courtship. The frogs and toads are no mean performers in this way,
whilst cats, deer, and other large animals are "singers," of a kind,
when stirred by mate-hunger. The monkeys chatter and make various
vocal sounds, but the gibbons and man-like apes produce excessively
loud and penetrating cries. These cries, though sometimes of fine note
and repeated rhythmically (as in the gibbons and chimpanzees), have
not the character of song. The beginnings of song in mankind are lost
in the mist of ages. The Australian black-fellows chant and dance
with rhythmic precision and a certain kind of melancholy cadence, but
they never attempt to fascinate the other sex by the use of the voice
(nor, so far as is known, in any other way), and, indeed, there is a
vast interval between their vocal performances and the love-songs of
modern civilized races. Man has not inherited singing from his animal
ancestry, but has re-invented it for himself. His real knowledge
and command of "music" is actually a novelty which has sprung into
existence within the last few hundred years.
There is no doubt that animals of the same species are attracted to
one another by smell, and that distinct species have distinct smells.
Further, there is no doubt that in many cases the special smell of
either sex attracts the other. But modern man has so nearly lost
the sense of smell--why it is difficult to say, excepting that it
is because it was not of life-saving value to him--that it is very
difficult for us to estimate properly the significance of perfumes and
odours. We know that the dog has what to us seems a marvellous power
of tracking and recognizing by smell, and that other animals appear
to be similarly endowed, though most usually we cannot perceive the
smell at all which they recognize and follow. It appears that nearly
all the hairy quadrupeds have distinctive odours, which they and their
companions can readily recognize, secreted by certain glands in the
skin placed here and there on the body, often on the legs and toes.
Some of these odours, like musk and civet, we can perceive, though most
have no effect on us. It seems to be an evidence of the absence of any
need for man to produce "perfumes" by the action of his own structure
that he has a feeble sense of smell and has so little perception of
any perfumes or odours peculiar to himself that he has when civilized
always made use of odorous substances (perfumes and scents) extracted
from other animals and from plants for the purpose, before the days of
cleanliness, of masking the unpleasant odours of putrescence pervading
his body and clothing. Later, when dirt became less common, he made
use of perfumes for the purpose of giving an agreeable whiff to the
olfactory organs of his associates.
In insects, for instance in moths and butterflies, and no doubt in most
if not all others, the sense of smell is astonishingly keen, and serves
as the great guide and attraction in courtship and the appeasement of
mate-hunger. A single female emperor moth was placed in a box covered
with fine net in a room with an open window in a country house. In
three hours a dozen males of this species had entered the room, but
no other moths. In twenty-four hours there were over a hundred, all
fluttering around the net-covered box in which was the female. In this
and other similar experiments it was found that the odour of the female
moth, though imperceptible to man, clung to the box after she was
removed, and that, for some days following, the empty box was nearly as
powerful an attraction to the males as when it contained the female.
The antennæ which carry the olfactory sense-organs are far larger in
the males than in the females, as is also the case in many other
lower animals where smell is a guide to mating. A single female of the
vapourer moth, which is common in the London squares and parks, has
been found to attract when placed in a box in an open window in Gower
Street a number of males from the neighbouring plantations; and such
is the penetrating and powerful character of these odorous substances
produced by female moths that in one species, in which the female is
wingless and lives under water, the odour escapes through the water and
attracts the males in quantities to its surface. The females then arise
from the depths, and, like mermaids or the witch of the Rhine, draw
the infatuated males beneath the water to love and death. In several
butterflies it has been shown that the males produce sweet perfumes on
the surface of the wings, which can be detected as such by man, and
act as stimulants to the mate-hunger of the female butterflies, which
follow the scented male in numbers. The sense of smell is thus seen
to be a much more powerful guide in insects than might be supposed,
and it is of equally great importance to them in other enterprises and
activities of life besides those of courtship. It has also a leading
importance in all the lower and lowermost animals, and is the ultimate
guide (for smell and taste are not separable in such simple forms) of
the motile spermatic filament in its journey to the egg cell.
I have in the course of these notes on "Courtship" more than once
stated that though man shares in common with all other animals the
ultimate impulse to "courtship," namely, "mate-hunger," yet that it
would be a mistake to suppose that he has mechanically inherited
from animal ancestors (as they do) those methods of attracting
and endeavouring to fascinate the female, such as the use of gay
costume, dancing and posing, beautiful singing, sweet perfume, and
gentle caresses, which, at various phases of his development, he
has practised. True, these methods are also practised by a variety
of animals, but not by man's immediate ape-like ancestors. None of
these means of courtship are inherited instincts or structures in man
as they are in animals. All have been arrived at and devised by man
afresh, as the result of "taking thought." And in the latest advance
of civilization some of them have been to a large extent either
discarded or, curiously enough, handed over to the female sex. It is
the woman now who endeavours to captivate the man by a display of brave
colours, clothes, plumes, and jewellery, and by exquisite dancing and
gesture. Not so long ago both sexes of man practised such display, but
in earliest times only the male, the woman being allowed to sport a
discarded rag or a broken old necklace if she were very satisfactory
and submissive in her general conduct!
I must endeavour very briefly to explain how this contrast of
"instinct" with "thought, knowledge, reason, and will" must (as it
seems to me) be regarded. There are three great steps in the gradual
evolution of the mind. The first is the slow formation (by variation
and survival of the fittest) of transmissible, and therefore inherited,
mechanisms of the mind, which are of various degrees of complexity, and
characterize different species and kinds of animals. These mechanisms
act automatically like those of a "penny-in-the-slot machine," and are
just as regularly present, and as much alike in all individuals of a
species, as are the other inherited structures, such as bones, flesh,
viscera, the skin and its coloured clothing of decorative feathers or
hair.
Later, and added to these inherited mechanisms--often interfering with
them and putting an end to them--are the mechanisms of the second step.
These are mechanisms arising from individual experience; they depend on
memory--the inscription on "the tablets of the mind," of the experience
that this follows that. They control movement and action, usurping
the privilege of the previously omnipotent inherited mechanisms or
instincts. This second step in the development of mind requires an
excessive quantity of brain-cells. It only makes its appearance at all
in animals with large brains, and reaches a far greater development in
man even than in the apes, his brain being from twice to three times
the size of that of the largest living ape. This use of memory and
individual experience--instead of an inherited mechanism, which is the
same in every member of the species--is obviously a great advantage
in the struggle for existence. There are traces of it in some of the
cuttlefish and insects, but even in the fishes and reptiles among
living vertebrates it is of small account, and the small brain carries
on its work by good, sound, inherited mechanisms or instincts, but
learns nothing, comprehends nothing! In the birds we see a little--a
very little--more capacity for "learning by individual experience,"
and it is only in the larger and later mammals that educability, or
the power of learning by individual experience, becomes of serious
importance. All the larger living mammals--horse, cattle, sheep,
rhinoceros, tapir--have acquired an enormous increase in the size of
their brains--as much as six or eight times the volume of that of their
extinct ancestors whose bones and brain cavities we find fossilized
in the Tertiary strata. Man has by far the biggest brain of all these
animals, and has a unique degree of educability, together with the
fewest instincts or in-born hereditary mechanisms among animals. He
has practically to learn by individual experience--and therefore in
the form best suited to his individual requirements--a host of most
important actions and behaviours which even monkeys as well as dogs and
sheep and horses never have to "learn," but proceed to put in practice
as soon as they are born, or, at any rate, without any preliminary
process of experiment and effort. Man is the one highly "educable"
animal. In consequence of his large brain and its roomy memory he can
be, and is--even when a "savage"--educated. Monkeys and dogs have
only small "educability" as compared with man, though more than have
reptiles or fishes. Man's mind is, therefore, in this essential feature
different from that of animals. The modern mammals with brains as much
as eight times the bulk of their early Tertiary ancestors have, it is
true, acquired "educability" and the power of storing _individual_
experience as "memory," but their memory is far less extensive than
that of man, and though its guidance is of great value to them it acts
entirely, or nearly so, without consciousness. No doubt man's brain
includes some hereditary mechanisms, but in the main it distinctively
consists of nerve-mechanisms, formed by his own individual education,
acting on receptive and specially educable brain matter. And the brain
mechanism formed by education is of greater life-saving value than is
that of the inherited instincts which meet general emergencies, but not
those new and special to the individual.
The third step in the development of mind is the arrival (for one
can call it by no other term) of that condition which we call
"consciousness"--the power of saying to oneself "I am I," and of
looking on as a detached existence not only at other existences but at
one's own mental processes, feelings, and movements. With it comes
thought, knowledge, reason, and will. We may speak of consciousness
as invading or spreading gradually over the territory of mind. All
the three steps of the growth of mind which I have distinguished can
be seen following one on the other in the growth of a human child
from infancy to adolescence. The second step--the development of
individual mechanisms due to memory--is not in most animals, and not
entirely in man, pervaded by or "within the area of" consciousness.
Memory is at first "unconscious memory," and there still remains in
man a capacity for forming "memory" which never (or in some matters
only exceptionally) becomes illuminated by consciousness. Apparently
the inherited mechanisms which we call "instincts" are never within
the reach of consciousness, though, of course, the actions determined
by them are. It is a difficult matter to decide how far the memory
of apes, dogs, and such animals nearest to man is conscious memory.
Probably very little. But it is only when memory, as well as the
impression of the moment, is pervaded by consciousness that reflection,
and reason and action dependent on reason, are possible.[6]
[6] I have alluded to this subject again, necessarily with some
repetition in the chapter on "The Mind of Apes and of Man," p. 262.
Hence it is that man in all the procedure of courtship stands apart
from animals. Even the Australian has not only an educable brain,
but a more or less conscious memory. He seems to be permanently, in
this respect, in the condition of an ordinary European child of about
five years old. Gradually in the course of the development, both of
increased educability and of more and more efficient and serviceable
education, man has first abandoned by slow degrees his violent
ancestral methods of procuring a mate, and has, as the result of
observation, reflection, and conscious reasoning, taken to courtship
by persuasion and fascination, similar to that of the birds and other
remote creatures, retaining, however, for a long period his habit of
fighting with other males to establish his claim to the woman of his
choice. And at last, in his later development in civilized lands, he
has abandoned the more obvious arts of courtship and has taken to
decorating his womankind instead of himself. He has made woman take
over the habit of courtship by the fascination of colour and pose
whilst he looks on in sombre clothing with thoughtful reserve. He does
not any longer even rely on his strength or skill in fighting in order
to scatter his rivals, but makes appeal by word to the sympathy of
the desired mate and trusts to the fascination which the power, given
either by superior intellectual quality or by accumulated wealth, have
for her.