THE NATURAL 



the male and female, and noted even the genital ardour 

 of this sticking leaf-louse, this milch-cow of the ants. 



Parthenogenesis is a sign-post. Nothing more clearly 

 demonstrates the importance of the male or the precision 

 of his function. The female appears to be the whole 

 show, without the male she is nothing. She is the ma- 

 chine and has to be wound up to go. The male is merely 

 the key. People have tried to obtain fecundation by 

 false keys. Eggs of sea-anemones, and star-fish have 

 been hatched by contact with exciting chemicals, acids, 

 alkalines, sugar, salt, alcohol, ether, chloroform, strych- 

 nine gas, carbonic acid. But one has never been able 

 to bring these scientific larvae to maturity, and every- 

 thing leads one to believe that if one succeeded, and that 

 if these artificial beings were capable of reproduction, it 

 would be but for a limited period. This provoked 

 parthenogenesis is neither more nor less interesting than 

 the normal. It is doubtless abnormal, but abnormal 

 parthenogenesis is not infrequent in nature; eggs of the 

 bombyx, of star-fish, and of frogs, hatch sometimes with- 

 out fecundation, and very probably because they have 

 accidentally come up against the very stimulant which 

 the excellent experimenters have lavished on them. 

 Whether sperm acts as an "excitant" or as fecundator, 

 the action is no easier to understand by one label than 

 by another. The queen bee lays both fecundated and 

 non-fecundated eggs; the first hatch female, the second 

 invariably male, here the male element would seem to 

 be the product of parthenogenesis and the female to re- 

 quire previous fecundation. In contrast, among plant- 

 lice, the generations of female continue for nearly two 

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