THE NATURAL 



female is without ornament. The sifilet, a bird related 

 to the birds of paradise has, fixed between eye and ear a 

 pair of fine plumes twice the length of his body, which 

 float as he walks like white blue-shimmering streamers. 

 It is a lover's paraphernalia, which the female in conse- 

 quence does without, while the male loses his after mat- 

 ing. 



The dissemblance of barnyard cock and hen are well 

 enough known to give everyone a clear idea of dimor- 

 phism in birds and to show difference of characters 

 parallel with difference of form. 



The dimorphism of mammals is even less often favour- 

 able to the female than is that of birds. One can cite 

 but the sole example of the American tapir where the 

 male is smaller than the female. 1 The contrary is nearly 

 always the case. Sometimes the two sexes have an 

 identical appearance: cougars, cats, panthers, servals. If 

 there is a rule, it is difficult to formulate, for side by 

 side with these felines without sexual dimorphism, the 

 sex of lions and tigers clearly determines their forms. 



Among mammifers there are bizarre resemblances and 

 baroque differences. The he and she mole, at first 

 sight, appear the same even to their exterior sexual or- 

 gans, the female's clitoris is, like the male's penis, per- 

 forated to let the ureter pass through it. But here, as 

 we shall see later, the morphologic resemblance by no 

 means indicates similarity of characters; the female mole 

 is excessively female. There is baroque difference of 

 sexes in the capped seal of Greenland and Terra Nova. 

 The male can puff out his head-skin into an enormous 



1 Translator's note. O sinistre continent. 

 46 



