This male flesh is doubtless powerful comforting to the mother to be. Female mammifers, after delivery, devour the placenta. One has given different interpretations to this habitual act. Some see a precaution against enemies: it is necessary to obliterate traces of a condition which clearly shows that one is feeble, defenceless, surrounded by young, a tasty prey at the mercy of any tooth; others say it is a recuperation of energy. This latter opinion seems more likely, especially if one consider the habits of locustians. The spermatophore is indeed the preceding analogy to the placenta. On the other hand, fecundation, before being a specific act, belongs to the general phenomena of nutrition: it is the integration of one force in another force, and nothing more. The devouring of the male, partial or complete, represents, then, only the most primitive form of the union of cellules, this junction of two unities in one, which precedes the segmentation, feeds it, makes it possible during a limited time, after which a new conjunction is necessary. If the actual acts are only a survival, if they have lasted after their utility has disappeared, it is another question, and one which I leave again to experimenters. It will be enough for me if I have gained acceptance of the general principle that animals' acts, whatever they may be, can not be understood unless one strip them of the sentimental qualifications beneath which ignorant humanity has covered them, corrupting them with providential finalism. While fully recognizing the immense social value of prejudices, analysis should be permitted to excoriate them and to grind them. Nothing appears more dear than maternal love, and nothing is more widespread throughout all nature: yet nothing gives a falser interpretation of the acts which these two words pretend to explain. One makes a virtue of it, that is to say, in the Christian sense, a voluntary act; one seems to think that it depends on the mother to love or not to love her children, and one considers culpable those who relax or forget their motherly cares. Like generation, motherly love is a commandment; it is the second condition of the perpetuity of life. Mothers sometimes are without it; some mothers also are sterile: the will intervenes neither in one case nor in the other. As the rest of nature, as ourselves, animals live submitted to necessity, they do what they ought to do, so far as their organs permit them. The mantis who eats her husband is an excellent egg-layer who prepares, passionately, the future of her progeny.