THE NATURAL 



Neighbouring species, the monk, the brown-rump, the 

 gold-rump show hardly any sexual differences. 



Numeric dimorphism follows dimorphism of mass; the 

 family of one sort of butterfly of the Marquesas Islands 

 is composed of one male and of five females all different, 

 so different that one long supposed them distinct species. 

 Here the advantage is obviously on the side of the male 

 lord of this splendid harem. Nature, profoundly ignorant 

 of our sniveling ideas of justice and equality, vastly 

 pampers certain animal species, while showing herself 

 harsh and indifferent to others; now the male is favoured, 

 now the female, upon whom the greatest mass of superior- 

 ities is heaped, and upon whom likewise all the cruelties 

 and disdains. The hymenoptera include bees, bumble- 

 bees, wasps, scolies, ants, masons, sphex, bembex, osmies, 

 etc. The place of these among insects is analogous to 

 that of the primates or even of man among mammifers. 

 But while woman, not animally inferior to her male, 

 remains below him in nearly all intellectual activities, 

 among the hymenoptera the female is both brain and the 

 tool, the engineer, the working-staff, the mistress, mother, 

 and nurse unless, as in the case of bees, she casts upon 

 a third sex all duties not purely sexual. The males make 

 love. The male of the tachyte, a sort of wasp rather 

 like the sphex, is about eight times smaller than the 

 female, but he is a very ardent small lover, marvellously 

 equipped for the amorous quest; his citron-coloured 

 diadem is made of eyes, is a girdle of enormous eyes, a 

 lighthouse whence he explores his horizon, ready to fall 

 like an arrow upon the loitering female. When fecun- 

 dated, the she-tachyte constructs a cellular nest which she 

 36 



