state of civilization is inseparable either from æsthetic pleasure or sentimental pleasure. [1] That is to say in the eye of some imaginary divinity who might be supposed to regard humanity, or even the slower mammals from a timeless or say five century altitude.--Translator's note. [2] One believes nevertheless that the male bat suckles one of the two young that the couple regularly produces. But these animals are so odd and so heteroclite that this example, if it is authentic, would not be a decisive argument. CHAPTER XVII LOVE AMONG SOCIAL ANIMALS _Organization of reproduction among hymenoptera.--Bees.--Wedding of the queen.--Mother bee, cause and consciousness of the hive.--Sexual royalty.--Limits of intelligence among bees.--Natural logic and human logic.--Wasps.--Bumble-bees.--Ants.--Notes on their habits.--Very advanced state of their civilization.-- Slavery and parasitism among ants.--Termites.--The nine principal active forms of termites.--Great age of their civilization.--Beavers.--Tendency of industrious animals to inactivity._ Social hymenoptera, bumble-bees, hornets, wasps, bees, have peculiar love customs very different from those of other animal species. It is not monogamy, since one finds in it nothing resembling the couple, nor polygamy, since the males know only one female, when they have even that adventure, and since the females are fecundated for the whole of their life by a single fecundation. It is, rather, a sort of matriarchate, even though the queen bee is not generally the mother of more than a part of the hive whereover she rules, the other part having sprung from the queen who has gone off with the new swarm, or from the one who has remained in the former hive. In very numerous hives there are about six or seven hundred males to one female. Copulation takes place in the air; as is the case with ants, it is only possible after a long flight has filled with air the pouches which cause the male's organ to emerge. Between these pockets, or aëriferous bladders shaped like perforated horns, emerges the penis, a small white body, plump and bent back at the point. In the vagina, which is round, wide and shallow, the sperm-pouch opens; it is a reservoir which can contain they say, a score of million of spermatozoides, destined to fecundate the eggs, during several years in proportion as they are to be laid. The form of the penis and the manner in which the sperm is coagulated by a viscous liquid into a veritable spermatophore, cause the death of the male. The copulation ended, he wishes to disengage himself but only manages to do so in leaving in the vagina not only the penis but all the organs attached to it. He falls like an empty bag, while the queen, returned to the hive, stops at the entrance, makes her toilet, aided by the workers who crowd about her: with her mandibles she gently