THE NATURAL 



CHAPTER IX 



THE MECHANISM OF LOVE 



I. Copulation: vertebrates. Its very numerous varieties 

 and its specific fixity. The apparent immorality of 

 Nature. Sexual ethnography. Human mechanism. 

 Cavalage. The form and duration of coupling in 

 divers mammifers. Aberrations of sexual surgery, the 

 ampallang. Pain as a bridle on sex. Maidenhead. 

 The mole. Passivity of the female. The ovule, psy- 

 chological figure of the female. Mania of attributing 

 human virtues to animals. The modesty of elephants. 

 Coupling mechanism in whales, seals, tortoises. In 

 certain ophidians and in certain fish. 



i. COPULATION: VERTEBRATES. Forberg's "Figurae 

 Veneris" exhausts in forty-eight illustrations the manners 

 of coupling accessible to the human species; the erotic 

 manuals of India imagine certain further variants and 

 voluptuous perfectionings, but many of these juxtaposi- 

 tions are unfavourable to fecundation, and a majority of 

 them have only been invented in order to escape too 

 logical and too material a result. Animals surely, the 

 most liberated as well as the most stupid, are ignorant 

 of all modes of conjugal fraud; needless to say no dis- 

 sociation can be made in their rudimentary minds be- 

 tween the sexual sensation and the maternal, between 

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