Beavers are the only mammals, man excepted, whose industry indicates an intelligence near that of insects. But their societies offer no complication, they are a simple grouping of couples. They do not construct their dams until the females have been delivered, this happens toward the end of July, one sees no other connection between their sexual habits and their remarkable works. These enormous trees felled and made to lie where intended, these piles stuck in the river-bed and interbound with twisted branches, these impermeable dams, all this hard and complicated work, the beaver accepts when pushed by necessity. He needs an artificial lake with unvarying depth; if he finds one made by nature, he accepts it, and limits himself to erecting his regular huts. Thus osmies, chalicodomes, or xylocopes,--or men, if they find by chance a nest prepared, hasten to profit by it. The instinct of construction is by no means blind; it is a faculty which will not be employed very often save in extremity: the present inhabitant of the Loire valley still arranges the caves for domestic use. To its injury, but of that it knows nothing, the bee profits by the artificial combs slid into its hive. The Rhone beaver has rested ever since men erected such excellent dams there. The fairy palace which rises in mid forest for the rubbing of a ring is the human, and animal, ideal. I must dose these observations on natural societies, in pointing out that if they are today based on something quite different from polygamy, it seems likely that they were in origin societies either of polygamy or of sexual communism. If one starts from communism one will very soon evolve either toward the couple, or toward polygamy, if it is a matter of mammals; or toward sexual neutralization if it is a matter of insects. The couple, polygamy, neutralization are methods; sexual communism is not a method, and for that reason one must consider it as the chaos from which order has little by little emerged. [1] Bienenzeitung (Gazette des Abeilles) janvier, 1850. [2] E. Rambert, after A. Forel, les Mœurs des fourmis (Bibliothèque universelle, tome LV). CHAPTER XVIII THE QUESTION OF ABERRATIONS _Two sorts of sexual aberration.--Sexual aberrations of animals.--Those of men.--Crossing of species.--Chastity.--Modesty.--Varieties and localizations of sexual bashfulness.--Artificial creation of modesty.--Sort of modesty natural to all females.--Cruelty.--Picture of carnage.--The cricket eaten alive.--Habits of carabes.--Every living creature is a prey.--Necessity to kill or to be killed._