PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



spider. Life is made out of life. Nothing lives save at 

 the expense of life. The male insect nearly always 

 dies immediately after the mating; in locustians he is 

 literally emptied by the genital effort: whether the 

 female respect, or devour him, his life would hardly be 

 longer, or shorter thereby. He is sacrificed; why, if this 

 is for the good of the species should he not be eaten? 

 Anyhow, he is eaten. It is his destiny, and he feels it 

 coming, at least the male spider does, and the male mantis 

 allows himself to be gnawed with a perfect stoicism. 

 The spider jibs, the other submits. It is really a matter 

 of ritual, not of accident or of crime. One might try 

 experiments. One might prevent the female dectic from 

 pecking the mistletoe berry which the male has dis- 

 charged on her; one might watch the coupling of mantes 

 and isolate them immediately: and then follow all the 

 phases from laying to hatching. If the spermatophagy 

 of the dectic is useless, if the murder of the male mantis 

 is useless, it will annul the foregoing reflections, and 

 others will rise. 



The white-fronted dectic is, like all the locustians (grass- 

 hoppers), a very ancient insect; it existed in the coal 

 era, and it is perhaps this antiquity which explains its 

 peculiar fecundative method. As the cephalopodes, his 

 contemporaries, he has recourse to the spermatophore; 

 yet there is mating, there is embracing; there are even 

 play and caresses. Here are the couple face to face, they 

 caress each other with long antennae "fine as hair," as 

 Fabre says; after a moment they separate. The next 

 day, new encounter, new blandishments. Another day, 

 and Fabre finds the male knocked down by the female, 



