Spring is not the only rutting season. Love's calendar covers the year. In winter, wolves and foxes; in spring, the birds and fish; in summer, insects and many mammals; in autumn the deer. Winter is often the season chosen by polar animals; the sable couples in January; the ermine in March; the glutton, at the beginning and end of winter. Domestic animals have often several seasons; for the dog, cat and house-birds, spring and autumn. One finds young otters at any time. Most insects die after mating; but not all hemiptera, nor the queen bee, nor certain coleoptera, nor certain flies. The stag and the stallion empty themselves, but not the ram, nor the bull nor the he-goat. The duration of pregnancy in placentaires seems to have some relation to the size of the animal; mare, eleven to twelve months; ass, twelve months and a half; cow, doe, nine months; sheep, goat, wolf, vixen, five months; sow, four months; bitch, two months; cat, six weeks; rabbit, one month.
There are oddities: fecundated in August, the roe is not delivered until seven and a half months later, the embryo remaining a long time stationary, and waiting for the spring to start again. In a she-bat ovulation does not take place until the end of winter, although she has received the male in the autumn: females caught during hibernation have the vagina swollen with inert sperm which does not act until the spring waking.
[1] One has the unpronounceable name, savants designating it by the jumble of letters: Ptilinorhynches. The other is called the "gardener."
[2] The title of his study is curious "Les Cabanes et les jardins de l'Amblyornis." (Annales du Musée d'histoire naturelle de Gênes, 1876).
[CHAPTER XVI]
POLYGAMY
Rarity of monogamy.—Taste for change in animals.—Rôles of monogamy and polygamy in the stability or instability of specific types.—Strife of the couple against polygamy.—Couples among insects.—Among fish, batrachians, saurians.—Monogamy of pigeons, of nightingales.—Monogamy in carnivora, in rodents.—Habits of the rabbit.—The ichneumon.—Unknown causes of polygamy.—Rarity and superabundance of males.—Polygamy in insects.—In fish.—In gallinaceæ, in web-footed birds.—In herbivora.—The antelopes harem.—Human polygamy.—How it tempers the couple among civilized races.
There are no monogamous animals save those which love only once during their lifetime. Exceptions to this rule have not sufficient constancy to be erected into a counter-rule. There are monogamists in fact, there are none of necessity, from the time an animal lives long enough to commit the reproductive act several times. Free female mammals nearly always flee the male who has once served them, they need a new one. A bitch does not receive last season's dog save in direst extremity. This appears to me to be the struggle of the specie against variety. The couple is the maker of varieties. Polygamy drags them back to the general type of the specie. Individuals of a specie frankly polygamous should present a very great similarity; if the species incline toward a certain monogamy, the dissemblances become more numerous. It is not an illusion which makes us recognize in human races almost monogamous, a lesser uniformity of type than in polygamous societies or those given over to promiscuity, or among animal species. The example of the dog seems the worst that one could have chosen. It isn't, it is the best, considering that in receiving successively individuals of different variety, the bitch tends to produce individuals not of a specialized breed, but on the contrary of a type where several breeds will be mixed, individuals which in crossing and recrossing in their turn, will end, if the dogs live in a free state, in forming one single specie. Sexual liberty tends to establish uniformity of type; monogamy strives against this tendency and maintains diversity.[1] Another consequence of this manner of seeing is that one must consider monogamy as favourable to intellectual development, intelligence being a differentiation which accomplishes itself more often, in proportion as there are individuals and groups who differ physically. Physical uniformity engenders uniformity of sensibility, thence of intelligence; this does not need to be explained; now intelligences count, and mark only their differences; uniform, they are as if they were not; impotent to hook themselves one onto the other, to react against each other, lacking asperities, lacking contrary currents. This is the flock, in which each member makes the same gesture of flight, of biting, or of roaring.