THE NATURAL 



arm enlarges in spatula, equips itself with a scourge, 

 loses its suckers, and then when heavy with life as a 

 ripe grape, it falls off, moves toward the female, comes 

 alongside her belly, lodges in the palleal cavity and 

 oozes out its seed into the organs where this will encoun- 

 ter the ovules. The male organ, here, appears as a tem- 

 porary individual, a third being between father and 

 mother, a messenger which carries the male genital trea- 

 sure to the female. Neither of them knows the other. 

 The male is wholly ignorant of the female for whom he 

 detaches a limb, and the female knows nothing of her 

 fecundator save the sole organ which fecundates. A little 

 more complicated than that of the fish, this method is 

 probably older, and seems possible only for aquatic ani- 

 mals. It is nevertheless that of many vegetables; this 

 swimming arm recalls the winged grains of pollen which 

 travel far from their pistils. Very few flowers can fecun- 

 date directly; nearly all have need of an intermediary, 

 the wind, an insect, a bird. Nature had given wings to 

 the phallus, ages before the imagination of Pompeian 

 painters; she had thought of this, not for the pleasure 

 of bashful women, but for the satisfaction of the most 

 hideous beasts that people the ocean, cuttlefish, calama- 

 ries, octopL 



106 



