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THE EVOLUTION OF SEX. 



Biichner's " Liebe Jind Liebcslebcn in der TKierwelt" which contains 

 an overflowing wealth of instances. 



III. Sexual Attraction. — Mantegazza has written a work 

 entitled " The Physiology of Love," in which he expounds the optim- 

 istic doctrine that love is the universal dynamic; and from this 

 Biichner quotes the sentence, that ' ' the whole of Nature is one 

 hymn of love." If the last word be used very widely, this often 

 repeated utterance has more than poetic significance. But even in 

 the most literal sense there is much truth in it, since so many animals 

 are at one in the common habit of serenading their mates. The 

 chirping of insects, the croaking of frogs, the calls of mammals, the 

 song of birds, illustrate both the bathos and glory of the love- chorus. 

 The works of Darwin and others have made us familiar with numerous 

 ways, both gentle and violent, in which mammals woo one another. 

 The display of decorations in which many male birds indulge, the 

 amatory dances of others, the love-lights of glow-insects, the joyous 

 tournaments or furious duels of rival suitors, the deliberate choice 

 which not a few females exhibit, and the like, show how a process, 

 at first crude enough, becomes enhanced by appeals to more than 

 merely sexual appetite. But it is hardly necessary now to argue 

 seriously in support of the thesis that love — in the sense of sexual 

 sympathy, psychical as well as physical — exist among animals in 

 many degrees of evolution. Our comparative psychology, too, has 

 been too much influenced by our intellectual superiority; but while 

 this, no doubt, has its correspondingly increased possibilities of emo- 

 tional range, it does not necessarily imply a corresponding emotional 

 intensity; and we have no. means of measuring, much less limiting, 

 that glow of organic emotion which so manifestly flushes the organism 

 with color and floods the world with song. Who knows whether the 

 song-bird be not beside the man what the child-musician is to the 

 ordinary dullness of our daily toil and thought ? The fact to be 

 insisted upon is this — that the vague sexual attraction of the lowest 

 organisms has been envolved into a definite reproductive impulse, 

 into a desire often predominating over even that of self-preservation; 

 that this again, enhanced by more and more subtle psychical additions, 

 passes by a gentle gradient into the love of the highest animals, and 

 of the average human individual. 



But the possibilities of evolution are not ended, and though some 

 may shrink from that comparison of human love with its analogues in 

 the oranic series, the theory of evolution offers the precise compensa- 

 tion such natures require. Without recognizing the possibilities of indi- 

 vidual and of racial evolution, we are shut up to the conventional view 

 that the poet and his heroine alike are exceptional creations, hopelessly 



