177 '°^^ '" ^^^ desert 



creatures, as to man, it can be sacred or profane, love or 

 lust. 



The tarantula's copulation is always violent rape and 

 usually ends in death for the aggressor. But over against 

 that may be set not only the romance of many birds but 

 also of other less engaging creatures in whom nevertheless 

 a romantic courtship is succeeded by an epoch of domes- 

 tic attachment and parental solicitude. There is no justifi- 

 cation for assuming, as some romanticists do, that the one 

 is actually more "natural" than the other. In one sense na- 

 ture is neither for nor against what have come to be hu- 

 man ideals. She includes both what we call good and what 

 we call evil. We are simply among her experiments, 

 though we are, in some respects, the most successful. 



Some desert creatures have come quite a long way from 

 the tarantula — and in our direction, too. Even those who 

 have come only a relatively short way are already no 

 longer repulsive. Watching from a blind two parent deer 

 guarding a fawni while he took the first drink at a water 

 hole, it seemed that the deer at least had come a long way. 



To be sure many animals are, if this is possible, more 

 "sex obsessed" than we — intermittently at least. Mating is 

 the supreme moment of their lives and for many, as for 

 the male scorpion and the male tarantula, it is also the 

 beginning of the end. Animals will take more trouble and 

 run more risks than men usually will, and if the Strind- 

 bergs are right when they insist that the woman still wants 

 to consume her mate, the biological origin of that grisly 

 impulse is rooted in times which are probably more an- 

 cient than the conquest of dry land. 



Our currently best-publicized student of human sexual 

 conduct has argued that some of what are called "perver- 



