From here, taking count only of exterior male organs or of organs
which, internal when at rest, emerge at the moment of coition, one may
attempt a vague and new classification of animal series.
1. Presence of penis, or of an erectile copulating tubercle: placentary
mammals from man to marsupials exclusively; certain runners and
palmipedes; crocodilians, chelonians, certain selacians, arthropodes,
the rotifera.
2. Presence of a forked penis: marsupials, saurians, chelonians;
scorpionides.
3. Disjunction of the secreting apparatus from the copulating
apparatus: spiders, dragon-flies.
4. Absence of penis, copulation by contact: monotremes (omithoryncus),
birds, batrachians, crustaceans.
5. No copulation; exterior fecundation of eggs: fish, echinoderms.
6. Indirect transmission of sperm with or without contact (by the
spermatophore): cephalopodes, orthoptera.
7. Hermaphrodism: mollusks, tuniciers, worms.
8. Monagamous reproduction: protozoaires, and certain of the last
metazoaires.
One needs many discriminations and exceptions to make this table more
precise. It is however, not untrue, although incomplete and lacking
nuances, and it permits one to see: that the separation of sexes
by well characterized copulating apparatus is not a sign of animal
superiority, although it is found among the most gifted animals; that
birds with their genital system merely sketched in, seem to represent
a type elevated in nature by the simplicity of organs and it means:
that the sexes in animals who are without copulation either profound
or superficial, tend, as in fish, to remain without difference; that
all other modes of copulation are attributed exclusively to inferior
species; that hermaphrodism was but a trial limited to a category of
creatures lacking everything not exclusively designed for the process
of reproduction; that the absence of sex characterizes only the
earliest forms of life.
If one considers no longer the mode of copulation but the apparatus
itself, with the male part, penis, and the female part, vagina, one
sees clearly that these extremely particular organs are hardly found
well designed save in two great branchings where the intelligence is
most developed: mammifera and the arthropodes. There might be, perhaps,
a certain correlation between complete and profound copulation and the
development of the brain.
CHAPTER IX
THE MECHANISM OF LOVE
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