REPRODUCTION AND SEX 511 



by as spectators. But the victorious bully does not seem to give 

 them much choice. On the whole we must confess that there is not 

 much to boast of in the courtship of mammals; at any rate till 

 man, at his best, rises to lover and to poet. 



One must not expect too much from cold-blooded animals; but 

 a few of them have courting activities. The male crocodile curvets 

 and capers in a most undignified way, roaring and bellowing at the 

 same time, and perfuming the water with a copious secretion of 

 musk from the skin-glands of his lower jaw and tail. Mr. W. P. 

 Pycraft, whose Courtship of Animals (1913) is a treasure-house and 

 a biological education, once had the good fortune to see a Painted 

 Terrapin flogging his desired mate's head with the whip-like ends 

 of his long finger-nails. Some lizards show off their graceful frills 

 and coloured collars, and one of their attractions is to open the 

 mouth very wide to show the vividly coloured interior. This looks 

 like wooing with a yawn ! Some of the male newts go in for amorous 

 writhings and fondlings, as well as display; and we cannot listen 

 to the croaking of the frogs in spring without being reminded that 

 the first use of the voice was as a courting-call. 



In most fishes the sexes can hardly be said even to come into 

 contact; but there are cases where the rival males fight, where the 

 male caresses the female, or swims around her excitedly, sometimes 

 flushed with gorgeous colour, as in the Gemmeous Dragonet. But 

 there are a few fishes that strike a subtler note. The male stickleback 

 is dazzling when he puts on his wedding-robes ; he challenges rivals 

 and they fight fiercely. A remarkable feature is that the females 

 swim about in troops outside the battle-ground, and now and then 

 the victorious polygamous male selects a temporary mate from the 

 company and induces her to visit the nest that he has built. But 

 the females are net passive. "The female that heads the troop swims 

 forward with rapid darts, followed by the others, suddenly stops, 

 and assumes a vertical position with her head towards the bottom." 

 The others follow suit and take up a similar position. Then the 

 leading female suddenly deals a blow that scatters the crowd, which 

 forms again in a few minutes. What can this mean ? In the Rainbow 

 Fish, where the male makes a floating nest of Algoid filaments, and 

 buoys it up with bubbles, there is a courting performance, in the 

 course of which the male brings the female just under the green 

 sunshade, so that when the eggs are liberated they float up and 

 are caught in the bubble-nest. 



In the lower reaches of the Animal Kingdom there is often some 

 sort of courtship, if we use the word, as we must, somewhat elasti- 

 cally, to include signals between the sexes and all outward display 

 of sex-desire. In most cases this cruder courtship is so far away 

 from our imderstanding that we get an impression of "queemess". 

 Nature is sometimes farouche. The apparently apathetic snail 



