The Courtship of Animals

by W. P. Pycraft

As we ascend higher in the scale it becomes apparent that life has gathered force. That primitive speck of jelly, the Amœba, with which we started, gave but two signs of animation—the power of movement, and hunger. Whether these responses to internal stimuli can be called instinctive is open to argument. But there can be no question about the instinctive nature of the behaviour of these higher animals. After the instinct to feed the two most powerful are the desire for self-preservation—the avoidance of danger—and the desire to mate. These two are the dominating instincts throughout the rest of the animal world, not even excepting man himself.

The tremendous power of “mate-hunger” has been overlooked by a strange confusion between cause and effect. Almost universally its sequel, the production of offspring, has been regarded as the dominant instinct in the higher animals. This view has no foundation in fact. “Desire” for the sake of the pleasure it affords, and not its consequences, is the only hold on life which any race possesses. And this is true both in the case of man himself and of the beasts that perish. Wherever this instinct becomes weak, or defective, extinction speedily and inevitably follows. This “Amorousness” is the motive power of “Courtship” wherever it is met with; manifesting itself in the eccentric, and often grotesque posturings, or in the loud and often musical cries which constitute the study of courtship. Intensity of desire is indispensable to survival.

Only the lowly and sedentary types, of which the Oyster may be taken as an example, lack this fire; and here because it is unnecessary. For the reproductive germs of this animal are discharged into the water, to take their chance of attaining their object. They are liberated unconsciously, discharged like the undigested residue of the food, without effort, and without cognizance of the act. This must be so, for the Oyster merely lives—vegetates. Sightless, and without power of movement, after its larval wanderings are over, it lives merely to eat. And even in this, choice is denied it. The currents of water mechanically brought to afford the necessary oxygen for the maintenance of life, bring with them the food which is to restore the slowly wasting tissues. To such a creature there can be no “outer-world,” no consciousness of the existence of individuality other than its own.

The desire for sexual intercourse is met with only where the co-operation of two individuals is necessary to ensure the production of offspring. Such individuals being free to roam, must have some incentive to seek one another at the time when their germ-cells have attained maturity. And this incentive is furnished by the glands in which these elements are produced: supplemented by the secretions of certain ancillary glands. These stimulating juices, known as the “Hormones,” will be presently described.

But if we owe our existence to the gratification of what may be called our lower instincts, it is no less certain that all that is best in us we owe to our offspring. We meet with the beginnings of altruism, which the begetting of offspring entails, far down in the animal kingdom, and it attains to its full perfection in the human race. Here only, in its best and truest sense, Love begins: though affection may be found, and in a high degree, in many of the lower animals.

Living things are as clay in the hands of the potter. But it is as if they made themselves, for the designer and the guiding hand are alike invisible. No vessel is exactly like its neighbour, either in the quality of its substance or in the details of its construction. And this because the clay of which it is made possesses that mysterious property we call life. A property which endows each new feature as it appears, with an individuality of its own, whose survival, or suppression, depends entirely on its relationship to surrounding parts; on its harmony with its environment, in short. Colour, size, shape, temperament, behaviour, may each be regarded as so many entities depending for survival on whether or not they can exist in harmony with their environment—the several parts which make up what we call the individual.

In like manner the individual—the complex bundle of parts and qualities—must attain, and maintain, a certain harmony with its environment—the outer world. The process of change, both in quality and quantity, which is for ever going on among the several parts of every separate individual, brings about the elimination of unfavourable variations; and “selects” those which vary in the right direction: that is to say, which serve to maintain a place in the sun for the individual in which these momentous changes are going on. But it is not enough that the individual should be in “working order”; it must be in harmony with all the conditions on which existence depends. And the standard of this harmony is set by that very exacting arbiter of life and death, “Natural Selection.” It is not enough that the instincts in regard to this or that habit should be keen, or that this or that particular organ of the body should be efficient—a certain minimum, all-round, standard of efficiency is demanded, or elimination follows. It is through this instability of “temperament,” this tendency to vary in infinite directions, that the balance between the individual and the environment is maintained. Evolution follows the line of least resistance.

The little boy who remarked that it must be “fiddling work, making flies,” was more sage than he knew. The complex web of factors which even a fly represents are beyond the grasp of human understanding. But it is clear that the reproductive instincts, and the emotions they beget, have played, and play, a tremendous part in the evolution of the higher animals.

Those whose business it is, for one reason or another, to study these emotions know well that “mate-hunger” may be as ravenous as food-hunger, and that, exceptions apart, it is immensely more insistent in the males than in the females. But for this, reproduction in many species could not take place: for the sexes often live far apart, and mates are only to be won after desperate conflict with powerful rivals no less inflamed. Thus it is idle to speak of an equality between the sexes in this matter, in regard to the human race. Dogmatism, and the frequent repetition of pretty platitudes, will not alter what Nature has ordained. The failure to realize this is painfully obvious in the utterances of many who speak in the name of the newly-founded “Eugenics” society, which seeks the means to ensure the well-being of the race by the spread of a more intimate knowledge of this all-important subject. The existence of what Mr. Heape has recently called a “sex-antagonism” is beyond dispute, for the instincts of the male and female are fundamentally different. The male is dominated by the desire to gratify the sexual appetite; in the female this is counteracted by the stimulation of other instincts concerned with the cares of offspring.

Amorousness, then, is the dominant feature of the males among all animals: and this sex presents yet another characteristic which is to be borne in mind. In all that concerns the evolution of ornamental characters the male leads. In him we can trace the trend which evolution is taking; the female and young afford us the measure of the advance along the new line which has been taken. Why this should be is inexplicable. But sooner or later the females assume, or will assume, all the features originally possessed by their lords; and finally the young also follow suit. That is to say, the females and young tend to retain the ancestral characters. In the course of time the ability to develop new features by the male loses its impetus, and not till then, apparently, do the females, and still later, the young, begin to share his glory. These remarkable features are strikingly illustrated among the birds, as these pages will show.