STUDIES IN ANIMAL LIFE. 47 



families. The male is often but a contemptible 

 partner, puny in size, insignificant in powers, stint- 

 ed even of a due allowance of organs. If the pea- 

 cock and the pheasant swagger in greater splendor, 

 what a pitiful creature is the male falcon ! — no fal- 

 coner will look at him. And what is the drone 

 compared with the queen bee, or even with the 

 workers ? What figure does the male spider make 

 beside his large and irascible female, who not un- 

 frequently eats him ? Nay, worse than this, what 

 can be said for the male Eotifer, the male Barnacle, 

 the male Lernsea — ^gentlemen who can not even 

 boast of a perfect digestive apparatus, sometimes 

 not of a digestive organ at all ? Nor is this mea- 

 greness confined to the digestive system only. In 

 some cases, as in some male Rotifers, the usual or- 

 gans of sense and locomotion are wanting ;* and in 

 a parasitic Lernaea, the degradation is moral as well 

 as physical : the female lives in the gills of a fish, 

 sucking its juices, and the ignoble husband lives as 

 a parasite upon her ! 



But this digression is becoming humiliating, and 

 meanwhile our hands are getting benumbed with 

 cold. In spite of that, I hold the jar up to the 

 light, and make a background of my forefingers, to 

 throw into relief some of the transparent animals. 

 Look at those green crystal spheres sailing along 



* Compare Gegenbaub: Grmdziige der vergleichende Anato- 

 mic, 1859, p. 229 und 269 ; also Letdig aber Eydatina senta, in 

 Mailer's Archiv, 1657, Tp. ill. 



