THE NATURAL 



live united and to share jointly in the cares for their 

 offspring. The state of couple, demanding a certain 

 dimorphism, assures by it, its perpetuity. When the 

 couple is dissolved, be it by polygamy or by promiscuity, 

 as has happened among Mohammedans, and among Chris- 

 tians (a religion, long powerful, functions both as race 

 and as milieu) the dimorphism is accentuated, each of 

 the elements escapes, in some measure, the strict influence 

 of the other sex. Likewise if, in consequence of identical 

 education, the psychologic dimorphism is attenuated, 

 even slightly it never is attenuated more than slightly 

 or if physical games reduce a little the physical differ- 

 ences, the couple is less easily formed and grows less 

 stable: hence adultery, divorces, excess of prostitution. 

 In all monogamous society, prostitution is the strict 

 consequence: it diminishes more or less in polygamous 

 societies where the free women are rarer, it would only 

 disappear completely in promiscuity, that is to say in 

 universal prostitution. 



Polygamy, apart from its indirect influence, has, by 

 the internment of women, a direct one on the dimorph- 

 ism. Set apart from the active life of the outer 

 world, and even from the air and light, the female of 

 the male polygamous human becomes whiter, whatever 

 may have been her initial colour, fatter, heavier, and also 

 more stupid and more addicted to all sorts of onanism. 

 Among Indian Mussulmen the man and woman appear 

 to belong to different species, the man being so tanned, 

 and the woman so colourless. Shut-in prostitutes of the 

 Occident also lose colour, and one would with difficulty 

 recognize two sisters in the soft, bleached whore and the 

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