1. _Copulation: vertebrates.--Its very numerous varieties and its specific fixity.--The apparent immorality of Nature.--Sexual ethnography.--Human mechanism.--Cavalage.--The form and duration of coupling in divers mammifers.--Aberrations of sexual surgery, the ampallang.--Pain as a bridle on sex.--Maidenhead.--The mole.--Passivity of the female.--The ovule, psychological figure of the female.--Mania of attributing human virtues to animals.--The modesty of elephants.--Coupling mechanism in whales, seals, tortoises.--In certain ophidians and in certain fish._ 1. COPULATION: VERTEBRATES.--Forberg's "Figuræ Veneris" exhausts in forty-eight illustrations the manners of coupling accessible to the human species; the erotic manuals of India imagine certain further variants and voluptuous perfectionings, but many of these juxtapositions are unfavourable to fecundation, and a majority of them have only been invented in order to escape too logical and too material a result. Animals surely, the most liberated as well as the most stupid, are ignorant of all modes of conjugal fraud; needless to say no dissociation can be made in their rudimentary minds between the sexual sensation and the maternal, between sexual and paternal sensation, much less. The ingenuity of each specie is small, but the universal ingenuity of total fauna is immense, and there are few human imaginings among those which we term perverse and even monstrous which are not the right and the norm in one or another region of animal empire. Practices very analogous to (although very different in aim from) divers onanist practices, to spermatophagia, even to sadism are imposed on innocent beasts and represent for them familial virtue and chastity. A physician, who has not obtained much glory thereby, invented or proposed artificial fecundation: he was imitating spiders and dragon-flies; M. de Sade liked to imagine ruttings where blood and sperm flowed simultaneously; mere kindergarten manual (Berquinade) if one contemplate, not without bewilderment, the habits of an ingenious orthopter, the praying mantis, the insect which prays to God, la prego-Diou as the Provençals call her, the prophetess as the Greek said! Baudelaire's verses ridiculing those who wish "aux choses de l'amour mêler l'honnêteté" Mix seemliness into affairs of Love