PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



male: it is a quite frequent sight in the country, these 

 butterflies with four wings who roll, a little bewildered 

 from flower to flower, drunken ships going where the 

 sails bid them. With flies, feminism is brought frankly 

 into the love mechanism. The females have the copu- 

 lative apparatus ; they force their oviduct, then a veritable 

 prong, into the male's belly; it is the females who make 

 the mastering gesture, the male merely grips this gimlet 

 with the hooks which surround his genital fent. It is 

 this same augur which the female uses to bore the wood, 

 or earth or flesh where she deposits her eggs. The coup- 

 ling is end to end, and one of the easiest to observe. 



Here are enough examples to show what is per- 

 manent in the mechanism of true copulation, and what 

 is variable in its exterior modes. Given the two chief 

 pieces of the apparatus, the sword and the scabbard, na- 

 ture, as one might say, leaves it to the imagination of 

 each specie to decide the best manner of using them; 

 all ways seem good if they fecundate. Nature has still 

 more remarkable methods, for the sexual inventions of 

 humanity are nearly all anterior or exterior to man. 

 There is not one whose model, even perfected, is not 

 offered him by the animals, by the most humble of 

 animals. 



If there is no general rule, if there is no one moral man- 

 ner of fecundating a female, one must recognize that the 

 same mode is fixed in the same specie, in the same genus 

 or family. I do not think that anyone has observed vari- 

 ation in the sexual habits of an animal; yet acts of 

 sheer disembarrassment being possible, one can not con- 

 sider the love method as being rigorously fixed. It has 

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