564 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



What can one say of these motherly fathers? In the first place, 

 sex is not a crisply defined character, there are masculoid females 

 and feminoid males. Masculine characters lie latent in many females, 

 as in birds; and a male mammal may be made to give milk; it seems 

 even that this has apjx?arcd in Man. Parental care, likewise, is not 

 wholly maternal; egg-care is not a monopoly of the mothers. Varia- 

 tions are frequent, and, should it become necessary, it is open to 

 males to become motherly. In any case, by capping the stories of 

 "parasitic males" with those of motherly fathers we may restore a 

 more balanced view of Animate Nature. 



In the second place, the reproductive sacrifice is greater in the 

 females, and the mother animal may die after reproduction. Then if 

 parental care is necessary the only possibility of survival is that the 

 males should become motherly. 



All such cases as the above are also of interest towards bringing 

 out more and more of the manifold analogies between animal and 

 human behaviour. So is it not a pity that the great fabulists from 

 Pilpay and Esop to La Fontaine, and again to Uncle Remus, did 

 not know such stories ? For what parables for parents would they 

 not have given us, and this not only with appreciation for father- 

 hood at its occasional best, but even towards its more general 

 bettering! Indeed, do not widowers often show this? 



The Argonaut's Cradle. — Few naturalists have had the 

 pleasure of watching the female paper nautilus or argonaut in an 

 aquarium as Mr. Beebc did on the Arcturus. She was in an explosive 

 temper when she was put into the tank, and effaced herself in a 

 clouQ of sepia. Indeed, she had to be transferred twice before she 

 had emptied her ink-bag and could be clearly seen. "She rested 

 quietly on the bottom with her many arms wrapped about her 

 beautiful brown and white shell. But, as soon as my face approached 

 the glass she rushed back and forth shooting directly at me, or 

 bumping against the opposite glass, and, finally, backing into a 

 comer." She eventually condescended somewhat ungraciously to 

 accept a small fish, which she ate. In all probability, some parental 

 complex made her furious, for, two days later, in a paroxysm of 

 rage, she flung herself clear out of the shell, which, is, of course, 

 rather a cradle than a house. It is not represented at all in the much 

 smaller male, and, instead of being secreted by the "mantle" as in 

 other molluscs, it is made by two flat plates on two of the arms — 

 the two arms which some of the old naturalists believed she held 

 aloft as sails to catch the wind. Mr. Beebc found thirteen hundred 

 eggs in the shell, each about ten millimetres by fifteen, tied loosely 

 together like miniature bunches of grapes. Some of them were well 

 advanced in development, and showed the embryo argonauts with 

 two relatively large red eyes. 



