Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities — John Shaqi
Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiaritiesFinck, Henry T.
Science
Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities
Finck, Henry T.
Beauty, Personal; Love
_Maternal and conjugal_ affection, however, are, as in man, so in
animals, the two strongest forms of family attachment. A French author,
M. Menault, has written a special treatise on _L’Amour Maternel chez les
Animaux_, and Dr. Büchner exclaims, _à propos_: “If a human mother, with
certain destruction staring in her face, dashes into a burning house to
save her imperilled child, and thus finds her own death, this sacrifice
is no greater, no more heroic, than that of a stork-mother who, after
vain efforts to save her brood, is voluntarily burnt up with them in her
nest; or of those elephant-mothers who, as Schweinfurth narrates, in the
African hunting expeditions, when the bushes along the shore are ignited
in order to drive out the elephants, seek to save their young ones by
filling their trunks with water and sprinkling it over them, while they
themselves are roasting.”
How low down in the scale of animal life traces of _conjugal_ attachment
are to be found is shown by the following case cited by Darwin: “An
accurate observer, Mr. Lonsdale, informs me that he placed a pair of
landsnails, one of which was weakly, into a small and ill-provided
garden. After a short time the strong and healthy individual
disappeared, and was traced by its track of slime over a wall into an
adjoining well-stocked garden. Mr. Lonsdale concluded that it had
deserted its sickly mate, but after an absence of twenty-four hours it
returned, and apparently communicated the result of its successful
exploration, for both then started along the same track and disappeared
over the wall.” Again, the naturalist, Mr. Bate, experimented on the
conjugal feelings of _Gammarus marinus_, or the sandskipper common on
English shores, by separating a male from its female, and imprisoning
both in the same vessel with many individuals of the same species. “The
female, when thus divorced, soon joined the others. After a time the
male was put again into the same vessel; and he then, after swimming
about for a time, dashed into the crowd, and without any fighting at
once took away his wife. This fact shows that in the Amphipoda, an order
low in the scale, the males and females recognise each other, and are
mutually attached.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account