THE NATURAL 



moreover useless, for the penis is a luxury and a danger: 

 the bird who does without it is no less wanton thereby. 



One finds general proof of the female's primitivity in 

 the extreme smallness of certain male invertebrates, so 

 tiny indeed that one can only consider them as auton- 

 omous masculine organs, or even as spermatozoides. 

 The male of the syngames (an internal parasite of birds) 

 is less a creature than an appendix; he remains in con- 

 stant contact with the organs of the female, stuck 

 obliquely into her side, and justifying the name "two- 

 headed worm" which has been given to this wretched and 

 duplex animalculus. The female bonellie is a sea worm 

 shaped like a sort of cornucopia sack fifteen centimetres 

 in length: the male is represented by a minuscule filament 

 of about one or two millimetres, that is to say about one- 

 thousandth her size. Each female supports about twenty. 

 These males live, first in the oesophagus, then descend into 

 the oviduct where they impregnate the eggs. Only their 

 very definite function clears them from the charge of 

 being parasites; in fact they were long supposed to be 

 parasites, while men sought vainly for the male of the 

 prodigious bonellie. 



Side by side with males who are merely individualized 

 sexual organs, one sees males who have lost nearly all 

 organs save the male organ itself. Certain hermaphro- 

 dite cirripedes (mollusks attached by a peduncle [stalk] ) 

 cling as parasites to the coat of other cirripedes: whence 

 a diminution of volume, a regression of ovaries, abolition 

 of nutritive functions; the stalk takes root in the living, 

 nourishing milieu. But one organ, the male one, per- 

 sists in these diminished cirripedes, and takes on enor- 

 32 



