PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



pure crystal bell in calm of the evening, he waits until 

 all the eggs have emerged, he arranges them in a heap, 

 then excited by somersaults, he drenches the lot of them. 

 But no batrachian patience is as curious as that of the 

 pipa toad. This is a hideous beast with small eyes, 

 mouth surrounded with whisker-prickles, skin blackish 

 green, full of warts and swellings. As the eggs are laid 

 the male fecundates them, then taking them in his large 

 webbed feet he spreads them out on the female's back. 

 Around each egg there forms a little protective pustule, 

 in which the young hatch. The female on whom a hatch 

 commences offers the odd spectacle of a back whence, here 

 and there, heads and feet are sprouting, or from which 

 emerge little toads as if born of a paradox. 1 This forma- 

 tion is another proof that nature finds anything good 

 which happens to attain her purpose, and that she cares 

 only for the perpetuation of life. An incubatorial pocket 

 was necessary, and she had forgotten it; no matter, the 

 animal will make one for itself, at its own expense or at 

 the expense of some other specie. The small pipas exer- 

 cize a real parasitism, ordered by an absent-mindedness 

 of nature. Whether the deposit of eggs be in the mother's 

 back or in the tissue of some other animal the parasitism 

 is no less evident, at most it is a question of degree. 

 From this point of view it will be possible to consider 

 the normal, internal evolution of sexual products as a 

 parasitic evolution: the young of the mammal is a para- 

 site of its mother, as the little ichneumon is a parasite of 



lr rhe back as gestative chamber is also found in woodlice, 

 during one of their parthenogenetic phases, cf. Fabre "Souvenirs" 

 VII, les Pucerons du terebinthe. 



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