838 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
ing in the highest considerations of passional gastrosophy and gym- 
nasticSy two more new sciences ; two notes of a scientific scale whose 
pivot is passional hygiene, a cardinal science, whose office is to purge 
the globe and humanity from all their physical and moral maladies. 
But, without speaking of gymnastics, or rather, of passional 
gymnosophy, let us^adduce those games of groups of children at 
the Tuilleries (or other free play grounds). The analogist, who 
has observed these games with continued attention, has not failed 
to remark a characteristic difference in the choice of amusements,'^ 
and the favorite exercises of the children of the two sexes. It is 
all natural ; the major sex has its strength to develop, the other its 
grace ; each does its best to exercise its muscles in the direction of 
its destinies. The boy learns to run and to wrestle, because he is 
destined for the race and the struggle. The girl not being under 
the same necessity, as she is not destined to contest and to run, but 
to be contested and run after, the young girl generally abstains 
from these violent exercises. She knows well that her little feet 
have not been formed for marching, but for dancing ; for woman 
has this in common with the most charming types of the feline race, 
that she leaps and bounds with more ease and grace than she runs, 
and she does not try to force the vocation of her little feet. What 
then has our observer remarked in the character of the games of 
feminine infancy ? He has remarked in the character of these 
games a decided proclivity toward the ellipse. 
I observe among the favorite exercises of feminine infancy, the 
shuttlecock and the jumping rope ; the shuttlecock, a poor winged 
heart, that is tossed from one to the other, with all the artifices of 
coquetry ; the rope, the high school of suppleness, grace, and 
elasticity. Both the rope and the cord describe parabolic or ellip- 
tical curves. Why so ? Why yet so yonng, this preference of the 
minor sex for the elliptical curve, this manifest contempt for mar- 
bles, ball, and top ? Because the ellipse is the curve of love, as 
the circle is that of friendship. The ellipse is the figure in which 
God with His artist hand has profiled the form of His favorite crea- 
tures, woman, the swan, the Arabian horse, the dove ; the ellipse is 
the essentially attractive form. The ellipse has two foci ! Two 
foci like love; two foci, in each of which all the rays proceeding 
