THE NUPTIAL FLIGHT 167 



giver of life should die at the moment of giving. Here this 

 idea, whose memory lingers still over the kisses of man, is 

 realised in its primal simplicity. No sooner has the union 

 been accomplished than the male's abdomen opens, the organ 

 detaches itself, dragging with it the mass of the entrails, the 

 wings relax, and, as though struck by lightning, the emptied 

 body turns and turns on itself and sinks into the abyss. 



The same idea that before, in parthenogenesis, sacrificed 

 the future of the hive to the unwonted multiplication of males, 

 now sacrifices the male to the future of the hive. 



This idea is always astounding ; and the further we pene- 

 trate into it, the fewer do our certitudes become. Darwin, 

 for instance, to take the man of all men who studied it the 

 most methodically and most passionately — Darwin, though 

 scarcely confessing it to himself, loses confidence at every 

 step, and retreats before the unexpected and the irreconcilable. 

 Would you have before you the nobly humiliating spectacle of 

 human genius battling with infinite power, you have but to 

 follow Darwin's endeavours to unravel the strange, incoherent, 

 inconceivably mysterious laws of the sterility and fecundity 

 of hybrids, or of the variations of specific and generic char- 

 acters. Scarcely has he formulated a principle when numberless 

 exceptions assail him ; and this very principle, soon completely 

 overwhelmed, is glad to find refuge in some corner, and pre- 

 serve a shred of existence there under the title of an exception. 



For the fact is that in hybridity, in variability (notably in 

 the simultaneous variations known as correlations of growth), 

 in instinct, in the processes of vital competition, in geologic 

 succession and the geographic distribution of organised beings, 

 in mutual affinities, as indeed in every other direction, the 



