IN THE SHETLANDS 281 
which we call, together, spirituality—is quite another. 
It offends our human pride to think that animals 
should woo and marry very much as we—when the 
better part of our nature is not in a strait-jacket—do 
ourselves. Therefore, there must be no preferences, 
no love-matches here, all must be in obedience to a 
blind sexual instinct—something very animal—about 
which we, of course, with our rings and our cere- 
monies, our novels, sonnets, spiritual affinities, and 
prudential considerations, know nothing. Unlike 
ourselves, the female brute must be ready to mate 
with any male brute that chance may throw in her 
way, and if it throw several, she must be absolutely 
impartial between them, there being neither looks, 
soul, nor money for her to found a choice on. 
Therefore she will go to the strongest, and ask no 
better, for love she knows not, nor can _ parental 
authority and filial obedience combine here to give the 
preference to riches or title, coupled with age or 
disease. Only by her complete passivity could the 
female brute be properly differentiated from the 
human female, and this she must be, or man (the 
worst brute that the world has yet seen or is ever 
likely to see) would lose his pre-eminence. 
But do no difficulties attend this theory of entire 
impartiality on the part of the hen bird (for we will 
keep now to birds) in respect to the cock, during the 
pairing season? That she is sexually excited by him 
—as a male, at least, if not as an individual male—we 
would surely have to conclude, even in the absence 
