CHAPTER XX 

 COURTSHIP 



IT is always amusing to find the lower animals 

 behaving in various circumstances of life very 

 much as we do ourselves. There is a tendency to look 

 upon such conduct on the animals' part as a more or 

 less clever mimicry of humanity — a sort of burlesque of 

 our own behaviour. Really, however, it has a far greater 

 interest ; it is a revelation to us of the nature and origin in 

 our animal ancestry of various deeply-rooted " behaviours " 

 which are common to us and animals. The wooing of a 

 maid by a man and the various strange antics and poses 

 to which love-sick men and women are addicted, are 

 represented by similar behaviour among animals, and 

 that, too, not only among higher animals allied to man, 

 but even among minute and obscure insects and molluscs. 

 In fact, the elementary principle of " courtship " or 

 " wooing," namely, the pursuit of the female by the 

 male, is observed among the lowest unicellular organisms 

 — the Protozoa and the Protophyta — and it holds 

 among plants as well as among animals, for it is the 

 pollen — the male fertilizing material — which travels, 

 carried by wind or by the nectar-bribed " parcels-delivery 

 company " of bees, to the ovules of a distant flower, and 

 not the ovules (the female products) which desert their 



homes in quest of pollen. 



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