THE NATURAL 



despite the good will of naturalists, salmon and trout 

 form practically only one family, and nothing is more 

 difficult, for example, than to determine the specie of a 

 young salmon, or to state the difference between a salmon 

 and a sea trout. 



The loves of fish (and also of echinoderms, star-fish, 

 sea-anemones, etc.) thus reduce themselves, in the main, 

 to those of ovule and spermatozoide. The essential. 

 But such simplification is rather shocking to the sensi- 

 bility of a superior vertebrate, or to an insect accus- 

 tomed to the amorous parade, to multiple and prolonged 

 contacts, to the presence and complexity of the opposite 

 sex. This fashion of love is, admittedly, not unknown 

 to men, but they seem to be led to it rather by necessity 

 than by taste, by morals rather than by the search for 

 the maximum pleasure. Genital satisfactions obtained 

 apart from contact, apart from being necessarily infecund, 

 save in scabrous scientific experiments, often cause a ner- 

 vous and muscular depression greater even than excess 

 committed in common. But this result is not so evident 

 that one can convert it into a moral principle, and 

 the fact remains that onanism, carefully considered, is 

 one among nature's gestures. A different conclusion 

 would be more agreeable; but millions of creatures would 

 protest, from all the oceans, and from beneath the reeds 

 of all rivers. One might go further, and insinuate that 

 this method which appears to us monstrous, or, since it 

 is a matter of fish, singular, is perhaps superior to the 

 laborious method of cavalage, so ugly, in general, and 

 so inconvenient. But there is not in terrestrial nature, 

 any more than in conceivable nature a high and low, a 

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