It is necessary that the male cephalopode fecundate the female. How will he do it, having no organic sperm-vector? He will make one. One thought for a long time that the female argonauts were preyed on by a parasite. This mysterious beast is nothing but the instrument of fecundation. The male has a pouch where sperm accumulates; in this pouch are made up little bags called spermatophores, the animalculæ move toward the third arm of the argonaut (nautilus), and this arm enlarges in spatula, equips itself with a scourge, loses its suckers, and then when heavy with life as a ripe grape, it falls off, moves toward the female, comes alongside her belly, lodges in the palleal cavity and oozes out its seed into the organs where this will encounter the ovules. The male organ, here, appears as a temporary individual, a third being between father and mother, a messenger which carries the male genital treasure to the female. Neither of them knows the other. The male is wholly ignorant of the female for whom he detaches a limb, and the female knows nothing of her fecundator save the sole organ which fecundates. A little more complicated than that of the fish, this method is probably older, and seems possible only for aquatic animals. It is nevertheless that of many vegetables; this swimming arm recalls the winged grains of pollen which travel far from their pistils. Very few flowers can fecundate directly; nearly all have need of an intermediary, the wind, an insect, a bird. Nature had given wings to the phallus, ages before the imagination of Pompeian painters; she had thought of this, not for the pleasure of bashful women, but for the satisfaction of the most hideous beasts that people the ocean, cuttlefish, calamaries, octopi. [1] In his "Historia Naturalis Ranarum," 1758, Bufo aquaticus. [2] The back as gestative chamber is also found in woodlice, during one of their parthenogenetic phases, cf. Fabre "Souvenirs" VII, _les Pucerons du terebinthe_. CHAPTER XII THE MECHANISM OF LOVE _IV. Hermaphrodism.--Sexual life of oysters.--Gasteropodes.--The idea of reproduction and the idea of pleasure.--Mechanism of reciprocal reproduction: helices.--Spintrian habits.--Reflections on hermaphrodism._