Organic Connection Between Physical and Psychical 267 



it to be important. But this much is clear as to its bear- 

 ing upon the point uppermost in this discussion: There is 

 an excessiveness of activity in a variety of ways, particularly 

 in the driving of other females, the presence of which in the 

 vicinity of the mate is merely incidental and utterly harm- 

 less. 



Obviously it is the demand, instinctive or organic or both, 

 for more sexual gratification than the natural numerical 

 scheme of the two sexes provides, and the actual necessities 

 of race perpetuation demand, which is largely responsible 

 for the contests to secure mates, so characteristic of all 

 higher animals. The bull fur seal must have forty or fifty 

 mates, instead of the one which the numerical equality of 

 the two sexes would naturally give him ; hence the fierce com- 

 bats among the males, with the result that a great majority 

 of the whole male population at any one time is forced to 

 remain outside the "harems" during the mating season. And 

 some such eliminative process must occur in all species where 

 the sexes are about equal in numbers, and where promiscuity 

 in pairing is practised. 



Nor are the injuries and disasters which may result from 

 the driving power of the sex-impulse restricted to compet- 

 ing individuals of the same sex. The mates sought after not 

 infrequently suffer seriously from the excesses of the seek- 

 ing males, the females being usually more passive and hence 

 the more liable to injury in this way. Thus, J. S. Huxley 

 has lately told of the exhaustion and actual death of the 

 female mallard duck from being repeatedly "tread" by the 

 males, the same and different individual males participating 

 in the strangely destructive performance. 



Finally, the individual itself is not safe from self-injury 

 through its own sex impulses. Some of the forms which this 

 sort of thing may take in the human species are too famil- 

 iar, too disastrous and too repugnant to need illustration 

 in proof of their reality. That they occur also more or less 



