The Natural Philosophy of Love. Remy de Gourmont

grasshopper isn't deaf, she has an almost insensible hearing. It is probable that the song of insects and birds, if it is sometimes a love-call, is more often only a physiological exercise, at once necessary and disinterested. Fabre, who lived all his life among the implacable noises of the Provençal country-side, sees in "the violin of the locust, in the bag-pipe of the tree-toad, in the cymbals of the cacan only a means suitable to expressing the joy of living, the universal joy which each animal species celebrates in its own fashion."[2] Why then is the female mute? It is certainly absurd and profoundly useless to summon, in almost uninterrupted song, from morn till eve, a companion whom one sees seated beside one pumping the juice out of a plane-tree; but it has perhaps not always been so. The two sexes may have had, in the past, habits more divergent. The plane-tree which unites them in the same feeding-ground has not always grown in Provence. The unending song may have been useful at a time when the sexes lived separate, and may have remained as evidence of ancient customs. It is moreover a commonly observed fact that activities long survive the period of their utility. Man and all animals are full of maniac gestures whose movement is only explicable on the hypothesis that it had once a different intention.

      The female spider is nearly always superior to the male in size, industry, activity, and means of defence and attack. We will note their sexual habits later, but must observe here their particular cases of dimorphism. The Madagascar she-epeire is enormous, very handsome, black, red, silver and gold. She rigs up a formidable web in her tree, near which one sees always a modest and puerile skein, the work of a minuscule male keeping an anxious eye on the chance of sidling up to his terrible mistress, and risking his wedding-death. The argyronete or water-spider, returns the balance to the male, who is fatter, larger, and provided with longer limbs.

      The male triumphs again, and more frequently, among coleoptera. The nasicom scarab, so called most aptly because he carries on his head a long back-bending arched horn, has all his chest solidly armoured; the female has neither horn nor cuirass. Everyone knows the flying-stag or lucane (stag-beetle, bull-fly), enormous coleoptera which flies through the summer evening buzzing like a top. He is feared for the bold appearance of his long mandibles which branch like stag's horns and which the uninstructed take for dangerous pincers. He is the male, his war-gear pure ornament, as he lives inoffensively by sucking tree-sap. The much smaller females are devoid of warlike apparatus, they are very few in number, and it is in the excitement of searching for them that the male, whose life is short and who knows it, whirls like a maniac, and bangs himself into our trembling ears. Here again one divines animals who have changed their habits more quickly than their organs. The old pirate has kept his daggers and axes, but abandoned, no one knows why, to vegetarian diet, he has lost all power to use them, he is merely a stage-super. But maybe this gear impresses the female? She cedes more willingly to this hector who gives her the illusion of strength, that is of the male's beauty.

      The glow-worm is a real worm, but a larva rather than a definitive animal. The male of this female is a perfect insect, provided with wings which he uses to seek in the darkness the female who shines more brightly as she more desires to be looked at and mounted. There is a kind of lampyre of which both sexes are equally phosphorescent, one in the air, the male, the other on the ground where she awaits him. After coupling they fade as lamps when extinguished. This luminosity is, evidently, of an interest purely sexual. When the female sees the small flying star descend toward her, she gathers her wits, and prepares for hypocrite defence common to all her sex, she plays the belle and the bashful, exults in fear, trembles in joy. The fading light is symbolic of the destiny of nearly all insects, and of many animals also; coupling accomplished, their reason for being disappears and life vanishes from them.

      The male cochineal has a long body with very delicate wings, transparent and which at a distance look like those of a bee; he is provided with a sort of tail formed of two silky strands. One sees him flying over the nopals, then suddenly alighting on a female, who resembles a fat wood-louse round and puffy, twice as stout as the male, wingless. Glued by her feet to a branch, with her proboscis stuck into it, continually pumping sap, she looks like a fruit, like an oak-apple or oak-gall on a peduncle for which reason Réaumur called her picturesquely the gall-insect. In certain species of cocides the male is so small that his proportion is that of an ant strolling over a peach. His goings and comings are like those of an ant hunting for a soft spot to bite, but he is seeking the genital cleft, and having found it, often after long and anxious explorations, he fulfills his functions, falls off and dies.