THE NATURAL 



varied in social bees, parting from the relation of the 

 couple, the aggression of the male, to end in the political 

 and autocratic fecundation of a sole female by a sole male 

 chosen among an hundred slave favourites. The mechan- 

 ism itself must have changed with the change of the or- 

 gans, complying with corporal circumstances and with 

 those of the milieu, under pressure of the nervous sys- 

 tem which demands acts without caring for the instru- 

 ments which must execute them. One finds proof of these 

 changes in the accidental hermaphrodism of a great num- 

 ber of invertebrates and even of fishes, such as the cod, 

 the herring, the scomber: a fundamental change since it 

 shifts the animal from a superior to an inferior category; 

 a recall to origins, doubtless, and an indication that the 

 species liable to such accidents are far from being physio- 

 logically fixed. It is very probable that analogous acci- 

 dents, less accentuated, visible sometimes in exterior mal- 

 formation, invisible in their psychological influence, are 

 the cause of certain tendencies in contrast to the sex ap- 

 parent or even real. But this does not yet answer the 

 main question: are there in animals, apart from purely 

 mechanical aberrations, erotic fantasies? One can 

 not answer with certainty. The animal merely follows 

 a groove; when he has gone through it, if he lives for 

 another season, he merely goes over the same ground, at- 

 tentive to the same need, submitted always to the same 

 gestures. Very true, but the animals familiar to man or 

 his neighbours, the dog, the ape, perhaps the cat, are 

 assuredly capable of erotic fantasies; it is therefore diffi- 

 cult to deny this tendency to other animals, to the so 

 intelligent hymenoptera, for example. Who knows, more- 

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