THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



182 



strikingly, perhaps, many of them abandoned force 

 majeure as the decisive factor in the formation of a mating 

 pair and substituted for it courtships, which became a 

 game, a ritual and an aesthetic experience. Every device 

 of courtship known to the human being was exploited by 

 his predecessors: colorful costume display, song, dance 

 and the wafted perfume. And hke man himself, certain 

 animals have come to find the preliminary ceremonies so 

 engaging that they prolong them" far beyond the point 

 where they have any justification outside themselves. The 

 grasshopper, for instance, continues to sing like a trouba- 

 dour long after the lady is weary with waiting. 



Even more humiliating, perhaps, than the fact that we 

 have invented nothing is the further fact that the evolution 

 has not been in a straight line from the lowest animal 

 families up to us. The mammals, who are our immediate 

 ancestors, lost as well as gained in the course of their de- 

 velopment. No doubt because they lost the power to see 

 colors (which was not recaptured until the primates 

 emerged), the appeal of the eye plays little part in their 

 courtship. In fact "love" in most of its manifestations tends 

 to play a much lesser part in their lives than in that of 

 many lower creatures — even in some who are distinctly 

 less gifted than the outstandingly emotional and aesthetic 

 birds. On the whole, mammalian sex tends to be direct, 

 unadorned, often brutal, and not even the apes, despite 

 their recovery from color blindness, seem to have got very 

 far beyond the most uncomplicated erotic experiences and 

 practices. Intellectually the mammals may be closer to us 

 than any other order of animals, but emotionally and 

 aesthetically they are more remote than some others 



