THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



176 



broods, these wrens lost favor v^ith many old ladies w^lio 

 promptly took down their nesting boxes because they re- 

 fused to countenance such loose behavior. 



In the case of the tarantula we have been contemplat- 

 ing mores which are far worse. But there ought, it seems 

 to me, to be some possible attitude less unreasonable than 

 either that of the old ladies who draw away from nature 

 when she seems not to come up to their very exacting 

 standards of behavior, and the seemingly opposite attitude 

 of inverted romantics who are prone either to find all 

 beasts other than man completely beastly, or to argue that 

 since man is biologically a beast, nothing should or can be 

 expected of him that is not found in all his. fellow creatures. 



Such a more reasonable attitude will, it seems to me, 

 have to be founded on the reahzation that sex has had a 

 history almost as long as the history of life, that its mani- 

 festations are as multifarious as the forms assumed by 

 Uving things and that their comehness varies as much as 

 do the organisms themselves. Man did not invent it and 

 he was not the first to exploit either the techniques of love 

 making or the emotional and aesthetic themes which have 

 become associated with them. Everything either beautiful 

 or ugly of which he has found himself capable is some- 

 where anticipated in the repertory of plant and animal 

 behavior. In some creatures sex seems a bare and me- 

 chanical necessity; in others the opportunity for elabora- 

 tion has been seized upon and developed in many differ- 

 ent directions. Far below the human level, love can be a 

 game on the one hand, or a self-destructive passion on the 

 other. It can inspire tenderness or cruelty; it can achieve 

 fulfillment through either violent domination or prolonged 

 solicitation. One is almost tempted to say that to primitive 



