The male is an accident: the female would have sufficed. Brilliant as are, in certain animal species, the destinies of the male, the female is primordial. In civilized humanity she is born in proportion greater as the civilization approaches a greater plenitude; and this very plenitude diminishes, proportionately, the general fecundity: whether we treat of man or of apple-trees, the male element in- or de-creases according to famine or abundance of nourishment. But the human race is not sufficiently plastic for the variation of births to be ever very great between the two sexes; and no warm-blooded animal is sufficiently plastic for this cause, so active among vegetables, ever to lead to the dissolution of the male. There are no natural laws, there are tendencies, there are limits: the fields of oscillation are determined by the pasts of species, trenches curving into cloisters which close, in nearly all directions, the alleys of the future. It is a fact, from henceforth hereditary, that the male of the human species has centralized in himself most of the activities independent of the sexual motor. He alone is capable of disinterested works, that is to say of aims unconnected with the physical conservation of the race, but without which civilization would be impossible, or at least very different from what it is and from the idea which we have of its future. Doubtless in humanity, as in the rest of nature, the female represents the important sex. In utter need, as with the mason bee, she could serve for the absolutely necessary work, to build the shelter, to gather the food, and the male might, without essential damage be reduced to the rôle of mere fecundating apparatus. The number of males could, and even should in such case, diminish with due rapidity, but then human society would in- or decline toward the type represented by that of social bees: continual labour being incompatible with the periods of maternity, the feminine sex would atrophy, a single female would be elevated to the dignity of queen and mother, the rest of the population would work stupidly for an ideal exterior to its own sensibility. Even more radical transformations would not be anti-natural. Virgin-birth might establish itself: certain males could be born in each century, as happens in the intellectual order, and they could fecundate the generation of loins, as genius fecundates the generation of minds. But humanity, by the richness of its intelligence, is less than other animal species submitted to causal necessity; by constant squirming in its nets, it has managed to displace a cord here and there, and makes now and again the unexpected movement. The coming of males once in a century would be unnecessary if some mechanical device were found for exciting the life of woman's eggs, as one excites those of the sea-anemone. If a few males were born from time to time, by an atavistic quirk of nature, they could be exhibited as curiosities,