And in this phantom under-world of Decadence, cast by the shadow of Life and peopled with distorted images thereof, the females are Dominant--larger in size, stronger, more active, more enterprising and ferocious than the males. As in the world of Vegetation, by way whereof Matter first quickened into Life, so in this realm of _Insectivoræ_ by way of which Life is gravitating back to the inertia of Inorganic Matter, in ever shallower, denser and more sluggish strata, the male is seen as appanage and victim of the female. In the beehive, he appears as ineffective drone amid a throng of strenuous neuter female-workers. And a female is his Queen. Significant again is it that insect-females are seen increasingly to have emancipated themselves from mother-instincts and maternal functions, as regards nurture or affection for their young. The single process wherein the warring males and snarling females of finer fierce, evolving species sheathe their claws and mute their hates in a co-operative, self-effacing instinct--Reproduction, here in this disintegrating world of Devolution, functions without welding spark, or lighting gleam of parent-altruism. At best, it is as chill, as colourless and meticulously mechanical as the interminable tickings of a world of clockwork. At worst, it is a repulsive rapacity on the part of females to secure perpetuation. And this secured, they straightway sting the craven male to death, or tear him limb from limb and ghoulishly devour him. Queen Bee leads her vassal suitors so strenuous and dizzying an ante-nuptial dance, for privilege of mating with her, that only one survives to claim the prize; the others dropping, dead and dying, in the wake of her murderous supremacy. And, as with other masculine and muscular females, her progeny are neuter working-females (sterile) and emasculate males (drones). As Feminists demand for human babes, the Bee-mother hands over her offspring to be brought up by the State. While some other insect-mothers, having reposited their eggs (to serve as bombs that explode and devastate their living hosts) straightway abandon them, and return to the more strenuous and repulsive female-pursuits of this Phantasmagoria-world--a clockwork kingdom fabricated of Life's debris, and drably mimicking the throb and motion of its mechanism in ghoulish mockeries and vacuous reiterations; the while it runs down slowly, ticking back to the molecular vibration of mineral inertia. END OF BOOK I NOTE.--_Mendelian and other readers interested in the more scientific aspects of the subject are referred to an Appendix at the end of this volume, in which these issues are further considered and some important evidences adduced._ FOOTNOTE: