humanity; but this fraction is of merely sociological interest; be he chaste or voluptuary, miserly or prodigal of his flesh, man is in his whole condition subject to the sexual tyranny. All men do not reproduce their species, neither do all animals; the feeble and the late-comers among insects die in their robe of innocence, and many nests laboriously filled by courageous mothers are devastated by pirates or by the inclemency of the sky. Let the ascetic not come boasting that he has freed his blood from the pressure of desire; the very importance which he ascribes to his victory but affirms the same power of the life-will. A young girl, before the slightest love affair, will, if she is healthy, confess naively that she "wants to marry to have children." This so simple formula is the legend of Nature. What an animal seeks is not its own life but reproduction. Doubtless many animals seem, during a relatively long existence, to have but brief sexual periods, but one must make allowance for the period of gestation. In principle the sole occupation of any creature is to renew, by the sex act, the form wherewith it is clothed. To this end it eats, to this end builds. This act is so clearly the aim, unique and definite that it constitutes the entire life of a very great number of animals, which are, notwithstanding, extremely complex.

The ephemera is born in the evening, and copulates, the female lays eggs during the night, both are dead in the morning, without even having looked at the sun. These little animals are so little destined for anything else save love that they have not even mouths. They eat not, neither do they drink. One sees them hovering in clouds above the water, among the reeds. The males, although more numerous than the females, perform a multiple duty, and fall exhausted. The purity of such a life is to be admired in many butterflies: the silk-moths, heavy and clumsy, shake their wings for an instant at birth, couple and die. The Great Peacock or Oak Bombyx, much larger than they, eats no more than they do: yet we see him traverse leagues of country in his quest of the female. He has only a rudimentary proboscis and a fake digestive apparatus. Thus his two or three days' existence passes without one egoistic act. The struggle for life, much vaunted, is here the struggle to give life, the struggle for death, for if they can live three days in search of the female they die as soon as the fecundation is accomplished.

Among all solitary bees, scolies, masons, bembex, and anthopores, the males born soonest, range about the nests awaiting the birth of the females. As soon as these appear they are seized and fecundated, knowing, thus, life and love in the same shiver. The female osmies and other bees are keenly watched by the males who nab and mount them as they emerge from the natal tube, the hollow stalk of a reed, flying at once with them into the air where the love-feast is finished. Then while the male, drunk with his work, continues his death-flight, the female feverishly hollows the house of her offspring, partitions it, stores the honey for the larvæ, lays, whirls for an instant and dies. The year following: the same gestures above the same reeds split by the reed-gatherers; and thus in years following, the insect permitted never the least design save the conservation of one fragile form; brief apparition over flowers.

The sitaris is a coleopterous parasite in the nests of the anthopore. Copulation takes place on hatching. Fabre noticed a female still in her wrappings, whom a male already free was helping to get loose, waiting only the appearance of the extremity of the abdomen, to hurl himself thereupon. The sitaris' love lasts one minute, long season in a short life: the male drags on for two days before dying, the female lays on the very spot where she has been fecundated, dies, having known nothing but the maternal function in the strictest limit of her birthplace.

No one has ever seen the female palingenia. This butterfly is fecundated before even getting rid of her nymph's corset, she dies with her eyes still shut, mother, at once, and infant in swaddling clothes. Moralists love bees from whom they distil examples and aphorisms. They recommend us work, order, economy, foresight, obedience and divers virtues other. Abandon yourself boldly to labour: Nature wills it. Nature wills everything. She is complacent to all the activities; to our imaginings there is no analogy that she will refuse, not one. She desires the social constructions of bees; she desires also the Life All Love of the "Great Peacock," of the osmie, of the sitaris. She desires that the forms she has created shall continue indefinitely, and to this end all means are, to her, good. But if she presents us the laborious example of the bee, she does not hide from us the polyandrous example, nor the cruel amours of the mantis. There is not in the will to live the faintest trace of our poor little human morality. If one wishes an unique sole morality, that is to say an universal commandment, which all species may listen to, which they can follow in spirit and in letter, if one wishes in short to know the "aim of life" and the duty of the living, it is necessary, evidently, to find a formula which will totalize all the contradictions, break them and fuse them into a sole affirmation. There is but one, we may repeat it, without fear, and without allowing any objection: the aim of life is life's continuation.

CHAPTER III

SCALE OF SEXES

Asexual reproduction.—Formation of the animal colony.—Limits of asexual reproduction.—Coupling.—Birth of the sexes.—Hermaphrodism and parthenogenesis.—Chemical fecundation.—Universality of parthenogenesis.

The primitive mode of reproduction is asexual, or what one will so consider provisorily, in comparison with more complex mechanism. In the first living forms there are neither sexual organs nor differentiated sexual elements. The animal reproduces itself by scissiparity or by budding; the individual divides itself in two parts, or a protuberance develops, forms a new being and then separates.

Scissiparity is an inexact term, for the division is transversal, and the two parts far from equal; it occurs in protozoaires, and further in worms, star-fish and polyps. Budding is common to protozoaires, infusoria, cœlenterata, to fresh-water polyps and to nearly all vegetables. A third primitive mode, sporulation, consists in the production inside the organism of particular cells, spores, which separate and become individuals; this occurs in protozoaires, as well as in ferns, algæ and mushrooms.

The first two modes, division and budding, serve also for the formation of animal colonies, when the new individual retains a point of contact with the generating individual. It is by this notion of colony that one explains complex beings, and even superior animals, in considering them as reunions of simple primitive beings which have differentiated themselves and still retained a solidarity, sharing the physiological work between them. Colonies of protozoaires are formed of individuals having identical functions, living in perfect equality, despite the hierarchy of position; colonies of metazoaires are composed of specialised members whose separation may be a cause of death for the total individual. There is then, in the latter case, a new being composed of distinct elements which, retaining a certain essential autonomy, have become the organs of a new entity.

The first living organisms formed their hierarchies thus: individual unicellular, or plastide; group of plastides or meride. The merides, as the protozoaires, can reproduce themselves asexually, or by division or budding. They may separate completely or remain attached to their generator. If they remain attached one has mounted a step and attained the zoide. Thence, by colonies of zoides one gets individuals still more complex, called demes. None of