PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



The plausible adventure of Daphnis has been presumably 

 often repeated, even though the limberness of the human 

 form is well suited to coition; but who has not been 

 surprised to see a heavy bull leap clumsily onto a lowing 

 cow, bending his useless hocks along her back, panting, 

 and often not succeeding save thanks to the good offices 

 of a farm hand? Among beavers, says A. de Quatrefages 

 (Orbigny's "Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle"), the ex- 

 ternal orifice of the generative organs opens in a cloaca 

 so placed under the tail that one hardly understands how 

 the coupling takes place. 



Certain matings are sheer tours de force, and the ani- 

 mal whether it be the scutillary, a tiny insect, or the ele- 

 phant, a colossus, is compelled to take positions abso- 

 lutely different from its normal postures. Nature who 

 firmly intends the perpetuity of the species, has not yet 

 found a simple and unique means thereto; or else, having 

 found it, in budding, she has cast it aside to adopt the 

 diversity of organs, means, and movements. There are 

 none, even to those of our own specie which man may 

 not criticize, even though he prize them; he has criticized, 

 and his criticism has been to diversify them still further, 

 which simplifies a fated necessity in making it pleasanter. 

 Morals term this diversification "luxure." * This term is 

 a pejorative which may be applied also to the exercise 

 of our other senses. All is but luxuria. Luxuria, the 

 variety of foods, their cooking, their seasoning, the cul- 

 ture of special garden plants; luxuria: the exercises of 



'The Latin luxuria and French luxure have no exact English 

 equivalent; our "luxury," is the French luxe; the phrase "the 

 exercise of pleasant lusts" is perhaps as near as I can come to 

 a definition of luxure. Translator. 

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