The Natural Philosophy of Love

by Remy de Gourmont

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.