W. P. Pycraft

“ What interpretation are we to place on these paradoxical facts? One cannot help asking why seven pairs of muscles should have been produced by one group of birds to perform what can as easily be achieved in another by two? It is true that the more generously endowed species are musicians by birth, the others only by training. But one cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. In like manner one asks why male and female, possessing precisely similar voice-organs, should not sing equally well, but they do not. Evidently mere mechanism does not alone answer these questions. ”

“ One of these potential queens and the males now speedily emerge, and for a day or two remain within the seclusion of the hive, feeding upon the honey stored in the combs.
The males are the first to leave, making daily excursions abroad in the search for mates. They display in this a very leisurely behaviour, rising late and not venturing out till the day is well aired. Returning early in the afternoon with sharpened appetites, they feed to repletion and soon fall asleep.
In about three days, however, the young queen ventures abroad, timidly at first, to stretch her wings in the sunshine. ”

“ Here, on a bare couch, with her Royal spouse beside her, she lies, a bloated, heaving mass, incapable of movement, depositing eggs with the rhythm of a machine, the mother of offspring which she will never see. A more unsightly picture of maternity it would be impossible to conceive: it is well, indeed, that it is hidden from the light of day. No such state of affairs could ever arise among creatures living an outdoor life, with enemies to avoid, and food to find. ”

“ Life begets Life, as Love is said to beget Love. The nature of this mysterious power we can only dimly realize, and the forces which underlie its manifestations few even suspect, save perhaps in a vague way. Yet the tree of Knowledge bears no fruit more vitally important to our well-being, than that which will make us “as Gods, knowing good and evil” in all that concerns the processes of reproduction. ”

“ Those whose business it is, for one reason or another, to study these emotions know well that “mate-hunger” may be as ravenous as food-hunger, and that, exceptions apart, it is immensely more insistent in the males than in the females. But for this, reproduction in many species could not take place: for the sexes often live far apart, and mates are only to be won after desperate conflict with powerful rivals no less inflamed. Thus it is idle to speak of an equality between the sexes in this matter, in regard to the human race. ”

“ These differences between the fully-developed male and female present nothing very striking; but how are the singular peculiarities of structure and instinct in the “workers” to be accounted for? They are present in neither queen nor drone, yet by them they are transmitted to their offspring from one generation to another! It is true that every worker, for a time, is a potential queen, and every queen, but for the grace of Chance, might have been a worker. All depends on the food. ”

“ Since each returns approximately to the scene of last year’s nursery, the arrivals are fairly distributed at the first; but nevertheless this distribution inevitably brings a conflict of interests between one or more males, perchance young birds about to start in life, and having therefore no definite objective. But whatever the reason, the competition is there. The strongest male remains in possession, and immediately commences to express the ecstasy of feeling which possesses him in continuous outbursts of song. Such, doubtless, answer to the bellowing of the male stag. ”

“ We cannot hope to understand the springs of courtship in the human race from what we observe in present-day society, or even from what we have gleaned thereon from the records of remote ages. We must get back, so far as is possible, to the very dawn of the human race: to that period of man’s evolution when his conduct was controlled by purely savage instincts. ”

“ The exercise of this, it is contended, has gone on for countless generations, and the tendency has ever been to heighten the intensity of the ornament by the rejection of the less favoured suitors in favour of their more resplendent rivals. Birds and Butterflies alike are supposed to be swayed by the same irresistible desire to mate, and mate only with what we may call the smartest and best—groomed of their many suitors; and these, of course, being the most vigorous, most virile, sustain the stamina of the race and so attain Nature’s end. ”

“ He is yet far from satiated; in him the sexual fever still burns fiercely, but somehow he seems never to make any attempt to provoke in his mate a like condition, as in the days before brooding began. On the other hand, he does not scruple to savagely pursue every other female who ventures abroad in his neighbourhood. So soon as a duck takes wing for a brief relaxation from the arduous work of brooding she is pursued by ten or a dozen already mated males, till at last she is obliged to descend on the water, and with her descend her pursuers, now to mob her without mercy. ”

“ When the mother of the hive ceases to maintain the standard of fertility set by her exacting daughters, she is put to death stealthily, as if in an excess of devotion: she is smothered under their embraces. Towards the drones now under sentence no such consideration is to be shown. When the word goes forth, the slaughter begins, and it gathers in ferocity. It begins in a massacre of the innocents—every helpless larval drone is ruthlessly dragged from its cot and thrown out of the hive to die: there is now no crime in infanticide, nor in the most gruesome massacre that is presently to follow. ”

“ But such preceptors are labouring under a strange delusion: they are suffering from a disease they wot not of, a “Disharmony,” as Metschnikoff calls it, a disease which blinds their perception of the motive power which has given them all that they believe themselves to have created. For these same despised instincts are the sacred fires of our being, and when they are quenched all that makes us human, love, ambition, and life itself will be extinguished. ”

“ The greater physical strength of the male and his higher brain capacity are probably the result of Natural, rather than of Sexual Selection. The former would weed out all the weakly and dull-witted in the ordinary course of the struggle for existence, the latter, during the early days of man’s development, would award the prizes of life to the most amorous and cunning, and to the most ambitious of the competitors. ”

“ In all that concerns the problems of sex, which is to say of reproduction, birds, speaking generally, display a briefer and more condensed sequence of events than the mammals; and, moreover, many species compel the attention even of the most incurious, to their behaviour at this time, through the development, either of song, or of fantastic displays of their amorous feelings: while others force themselves no less conspicuously under notice by their habit of nesting in large, and often enormous colonies. ”

“ Moreover, in the matter of size and beauty there is little to choose between the sexes; where any difference occurs the males have the advantage. Though the mode of copulation is well known, nothing has been discovered as to the means whereby male and female discover one another. It is doubtful whether this can be done by sight, for with all the beauty of their shimmering suits of mail and gauzy wings, their vision is limited to a field of a few inches. Possibly scent is their guide; at any rate, dead Dragon-flies have a vile odour. ”

“ Sightless, and without power of movement, after its larval wanderings are over, it lives merely to eat. And even in this, choice is denied it. The currents of water mechanically brought to afford the necessary oxygen for the maintenance of life, bring with them the food which is to restore the slowly wasting tissues. To such a creature there can be no “outer-world,” no consciousness of the existence of individuality other than its own. ”

“ Parthenogenesis not only does not occur in the human race, but it does not even occur in any member of the great group of vertebrates of which man himself stands at the head, and it never will occur.
Those near relations of the Bees, the Ants, afford a further insight into this strange method of reproduction. Each community in the case of these insects harbours not one, but many queens. The nuptial flight, like that of the Bees, takes place in mid-air; but myriads of both sexes participate therein, forming a filmy, ever-shifting cloud, now rising, now falling, in the shimmering sunlight. ”

“ In the genus Esmeralda the sexes differ so greatly in colour that they have been ranked as distinct species: in one species both are of a beautiful shining green, but the male has a red thorax. On the whole, as far as I could judge, the females of those Prionidæ in which the sexes differ are coloured more richly than the males, and this does not accord with the common rule in regard to colour when acquired through sexual selection.”
While there is nothing very remarkable in the two sexes being coloured alike, it is certainly strange to find the female more brilliantly coloured than the male. ”

“ All the indoor work of the house falls on these Cinderellas. Not only do they, and they alone, feed the young, but they have to produce the wax and build the combs and attend to the sanitary arrangements: “they are the brewers of the honey and the keepers of the stores; they feed the queen bee on her ceaseless rounds and give the drones, their brothers, their daily rations of bee-milk”—what else these lazy creatures need they take for themselves from the honey-vats. But this is not all. They have to meet their older sisters returning from the fields and gardens laden with nectar. ”

“ As we ascend higher in the scale it becomes apparent that life has gathered force. That primitive speck of jelly, the Amœba, with which we started, gave but two signs of animation—the power of movement, and hunger. Whether these responses to internal stimuli can be called instinctive is open to argument. But there can be no question about the instinctive nature of the behaviour of these higher animals. After the instinct to feed the two most powerful are the desire for self-preservation—the avoidance of danger—and the desire to mate. ”

“ Unfortunately, though I spent many a precious hour on the watch from time to time, I could never see that these combats came to anything; the males seemed always to be in a state of passionate excitement, and the females to be always indifferent and unconcerned; and though the dismembered chelipeds of vanquished males could often be seen lying on the battle-field, I never had the satisfaction of beholding a good stand-up fight, fought out to the sweet end, or a female rewarding a successful champion with her heartless person. ”

“ Promiscuity in the past was never the practice of any race, its existence to-day, among both savage and civilized people, is due in part to imperfections in the social scheme, and in part to the vagaries of individuals.
That the sexual instincts form the bed-rock on which depends the survival of all races of animals, which, for their propagation, require the co-operation of separate sexes, is beyond dispute. And it is no less certain that in so far as the evolution of man is concerned, jealousy has been a powerful integrating factor. ”

“ One turns to the male for what is new in the history of a species, to the female and young for indications of past history. It is equally true that in their coloration one finds the same sequence of development—the male first, then the female, then the young, till both sexes, and all stages, are once more alike in hue. And this rule seems to apply to coloration of all kinds—Protective—Warning—Epigamic. ”

“ The worker bee knows no leisure for the improvement of her mind and morals. She needs none, for she has neither: she is a creature of routine, a living automaton apparently. Yet there are incidents in this wonderful community which seem too complex to be merely the result of instinct unaided, uninspired, by intelligence albeit of a nebulous kind.
The worker-bees, it has been remarked, are barren: their reproductive organs are atrophied, and by the decree, not of the queen-mother of the hive, nor of the males, but of their own caste. ”

“ Speedily the youngster steps out, distinguishable from her elder sisters only by her weak, grey-hued, flaccid appearance. Her first act on gaining freedom is to groom herself down, after which she proceeds to explore the gloomy, busy, crowded thoroughfares of the hive. A day or two is thus passed in gathering strength. On the second appetite returns, and she proceeds to help herself from the vats of honey and pollen bins scattered here and there among the cradles of her sisters yet prisoners. ”

“ This dominance of what are popularly called the animal passions is the outcome of a perfectly natural process, whereby those in which these passions were defective died without offspring, while those who tended to excess were similarly eliminated. The desire for offspring for its own sake may exist among our own species to-day but, normally, offspring follows as an effect not as a cause. Many of our social problems would straighten themselves out if these facts were once faced and acknowledged; we are apt to concern ourselves with what should be—according to our ideals—rather than what is. ”