But whether the reader rejects or accepts my interpretations, the groundwork of facts on which they rest is so instructive of itself that a perusal of the following pages cannot be quite fruitless. CH. LETOURNEAU. THE EVOLUTION OF MARRIAGE AND OF THE FAMILY. CHAPTER I. THE BIOLOGICAL ORIGIN OF MARRIAGE. I. _The True Place of Man in the Animal Kingdom._--Man is a mammiferous, bimanous vertebrate--Biology the starting-point of sociology--The origin of love. II. _Reproduction._--Nutrition and reproduction--Scissiparity--Budding--Ovulation--Conjugation-- Impregnation--Reproduction in the invertebrates--The entity called Nature--Organic specialisation and reproduction--A dithyramb by Haeckel. III. _Rut and Love._--Rut renders sociable--Rut is a short puberty--Its organic adornment--The frenzy of rut--Physiological reason of rut in mammals--Love and rut--Schopenhauer and the designs of Nature. IV. _Love of Animals._--Love and death--The law of coquetry--The law of battle--Jealousy and æsthetic considerations--Love amongst birds--Effects of sexual selection--The loves of the skylark--The males of the blue heron and their combats--Battles of male geese and male gallinaceæ--Courteous duels between males--Æsthetic seduction among certain birds--Æsthetic constructions--Musical seduction--Predominance of the female among certain birds--Greater sensuality of the male--Effect of sexual exaltation--A Cartesian paradox--Individual choice amongst animals--Individual fancies of females--General propositions. I. _The True Place of Man._ We have too long been accustomed to study human society as if man were a being apart in the universe. In comparing human bipeds with animals it has seemed as if we were disparaging these so-called demi-gods. It is to this blind prejudice that we must attribute the tardy rise of anthropological sociology. A deeper knowledge of biological science and of inferior races has at last cured us of this childish vanity. We have decided to assign to man his true place in the organic world of our little globe. Granted that the human biped is incontestably the most intelligent of terrestrial animals, yet, by his histological texture, by his organs, and by the functions of these organs, he is evidently only an animal, and easily classed in the series: he is a bimanous, mammiferous vertebrate. Not that by his most glorious representatives, by those whom we call men of genius, man does not rise prodigiously above his distant relations of the mammal class; but, on the other hand, by imperfectly developed specimens he descends far below many species of animals; for if the idiot is only an exception, the man of genius is still more so. In fact, the lowest human races, with whose anatomy, psychology, and sociology we are to-day familiar, can only inspire us with feelings of modesty. They furnish studies in ethnography which have struck a mortal blow at the dreams of “the kingdom of man.”