[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.
[CHAPTER XII]
THE MECHANISM OF LOVE
IV. Hermaphrodism.—Sexual life of oysters.—Gasteropodes.—The idea of reproduction and the idea of pleasure.—Mechanism of reciprocal reproduction: helices.—Spintrian habits.—Reflections on hermaphrodism.
Fish are the only vertebrates among whom one encounters hermaphrodism, either accidental: cyprins, herrings, scombers; or regular, sargue, sparaillon, seran. The myxines, very humble fish living as parasites, are alternative hermaphrodites, like oysters, like ascides; the genital gland functions first as testicle, then as ovary. The amphioxus, the bridge between invertebrates and vertebrates, is not hermaphrodite. The most strongly marked and most complicated forms of hermaphrodism are found in mollusks, and chiefly in gasteropodes. The alternate hermaphrodism of oysters produces effects which have been observed throughout antiquity. The advice to abstain from oysters during months lacking an "r" is based on a fact, and that fact sexual. From September to May, they are males, they are testicles, they elaborate sperm, they are good; from June to August the ovaries bourgeon, fill with eggs which turn whitish as they ripen, the oysters are females, they are bad; fecundation takes place at this time, the spermatozoides, born in the preceding period, finally perform their office. Superstitions before being rejected ought to be minutely observed and analysed, there is nearly always a kernel of truth in the gross envelope.
In the hermaphrodism of echinoderms, of fish, there is never auto-fecundation; either the sexual products meet outside the animals, which have neither copulating organs, nor a related genital life; it is a simple growth of germs; or, in a more complex phase the individuals have exterior male organs, and female organs, but they can not use them without the aid of another individual acting either as male, or as female. Here a new distinction is imposed: either the animal will be successively male, and then female; or it will be both at once. This union of the two sexes seems useless, according to human logic, when the two genital glands ripen at different seasons; one understands it better when the reciprocal fecundation is simultaneous, since this doubles the number of females and better assures the conservation of the specie. One must set aside the idea of pleasure. Apart from the fact that we can judge it only by a very distant and even dubious analogy considering the difference between the nervous systems of man and mollusk, one must set it aside as useless. Pleasure is a result not an aim. In most animal species coition is but a prelude to death, and often love and death work their supreme act in the same instant. Copulation of insects is suicide: would it be reasonable to consider it as produced by a desire to die? One must dissociate the idea of pleasure and the idea of love, if one wants to understand anything of the tragic movements which perpetually beget life at the expense of life itself. Pleasure explains nothing. People might simply be commanded to die as a means of reproduction, they would obey with the same eagerness: this is observed even in humanity. Dithyrambs on pleasure would be misplaced apropos of the mutual ticklings of two snails on a vine-leaf; the subject is rather uncomfortable.
Note then two helices, both bisexual, fulfilling exactly the biblical phrase: "he created them male and female"; their genital organs are very well developed; the penis and oviduct opening into a vestibule, which in the act of copulation unbellies itself in part, so that the penis and vagina come in touch with the orifice; mutual intromission takes place. A third organ comes from the vestibule, without analogy in superior animals; it is a little pocket containing a small stiletto, a jewelled dagger; it is an excitative organ, the needle to prick up desires. These beasts who have prepared for love by fasting, by long rubbings, by whole days of close pressure, finally come to a decision, the swords come out of their scabbards, they conscientiously stab each other, this causes the penis to rise from its sheath; the double mating is accomplished.
There are species in which the position of the organs is such that the same individual can not be at the same time the female of the one for whom he acts as male, but he can at that moment serve as female to another male, who is female to a third, and so on. This explains the garlands of spintrian gasteropodes which one sees realizing innocently and according to the ineluctable wish of nature, carnal imaginations that have been the boast of erotic humanity. Facing this light from animal habits, debauchery loses all character and all its tang, because it loses all immorality. Man, who unites in himself the aptitudes of all the animals, all their laborious instincts, all their industries, could not escape the heritage of their sexual methods; and there is no lewdness which has not its normal type in nature, somewhere.