Observe, also, those grotesque Entomostraca,[17] popularly called “water-fleas,” although, as you perceive, they have little resemblance in form or manners to our familiar (somewhat too familiar) bedfellows. This ([Fig. 8]) is a Cyclops, with only one eye in the centre of its forehead, and carrying two sacs, filled with eggs, like panniers. You observe he has no legs; or, rather, legs and arms are hoisted up to the head, and become antennæ (or feelers). Here ([Fig. 9]) is a Daphnia, grotesque enough, throwing up his arms in astonished awkwardness, and keeping his legs actively at work inside the shell—as respirators, in fact. Here ([Fig. 10]) is an Eurycercus, less grotesque, and with a much smaller eye. Talking of eyes, there is one of these Entomostraca named Polyphemus, whose head is all eye; and another, named Caligus, who has no head at all. Other paradoxes and wonders are presented by this interesting group of animals;[18] but they all sink into insignificance beside the paradox of the amazonian entomostracon, the Apus—a race which dispenses with masculine services altogether, a race of which there are no males!
Fig. 10.
Eurycercus: a heart;
b eggs; c digestive tube (Magnified).
I well remember the pleasant evening on which I first made the personal acquaintance of this amazing amazon. It was at Munich, and in the house of a celebrated naturalist, in whose garden an agreeable assemblage of poets, professors, and their wives, sauntered in the light of a setting sun, breaking up into groups and têtes-à-têtes, to re-form into larger groups. We had taken coffee under the branching coolness of trees, and were now loitering through the brief interval till supper. Our host had just returned from an expedition of some fifty miles to a particular pond, known to be inhabited by the Apus. He had made this journey because the race, although prolific, is rare, and is not to be found in every spot. For three successive years had he gone to the same pond, in quest of the male: but no male was to be found among thousands of egg-bearing females, some of which he had brought away with him, and was showing us. We were amused to see them swimming about, sometimes on their backs, using their long oars, sometimes floating, but always incessantly agitating the water with their ten pairs of breathing legs; and the ladies, gathered round the jar, were hugely elated at the idea of animals getting rid altogether of the sterner sex—clearly a useless incumbrance in the scheme of things!
The fact that no male Apus has yet been found is not without precedent. Léon Dufour, the celebrated entomologist, declares that he never found the male of the gall insect (Diplolepis gallæ tinctoriæ), though he has examined thousands: they were all females, and bore well-developed eggs on emerging from the gall-nut in which their infancy had passed. In two other species of gall insect—Cynips divisa and Cynips folii—Hartig says he was unable to find a male; and he examined about thirteen thousand. Brogniart never found the male of another entomostracon (Limnadia gigas), nor could Jurine find that of our Polyphemus. These negatives prove, at least, that if the males exist at all, they must be excessively rare, and their services can be dispensed with; a conclusion which becomes acceptable when we learn that bees, moths, plant-lice (Aphides), and our grotesque friend Daphnia ([Fig. 9]) lay eggs which may be reared apart, will develop into females, and these will produce eggs which will in turn produce other females, and so on, generation after generation, although each animal be reared in a vessel apart from all others.
While on this subject, I cannot forbear making a reflection. It must be confessed that our sex cuts but a poor figure in some great families. If the male is in some families grander, fiercer, more splendid, and more highly endowed than the female, this occasional superiority is more than counterbalanced by the still greater inferiority of the sex in other families. The male is often but a contemptible partner, puny in size, insignificant in powers, stinted even of a due allowance of organs. If the peacock and the pheasant swagger in greater splendour, what a pitiful creature is the male falcon—no falconer will look at him. And what is the drone compared with the queen bee, or even with the workers? What figure does the male spider make beside his large and irascible female,—who not unfrequently eats him? Nay, worse than this, what can be said for the male Rotifer, the male Barnacle, the male Lernæa—gentlemen who cannot even boast of a perfect digestive apparatus, sometimes not of a digestive organ at all? Nor is this meagreness confined to the digestive system only. In some cases, as in some male Rotifers, the usual organs of sense and locomotion are wanting;[19] and in a parasitic Lernæa, the degradation is moral as well as physical: the female lives in the gills of a fish, sucking its juices, and the ignoble husband lives as a parasite upon her!
Fig. 11.
Volvox Globator, with eight volvoces enclosed (Magnified).