The Natural Philosophy of Love

This book, which is only an essay, because its subject matter is so immense, represents, nevertheless, an ambition: one wanted to enlarge the general psychology of love, startin...

The importance of the sexual act.--Its ineluctable character.--Animals who live only to reproduce themselves.--The strife for love, and for death. --Females fecundated at the ve...

The primitive mode of reproduction is asexual, or what one will so consider provisorily, in comparison with more complex mechanism. In the first living forms there are neither s...

I. Invertebrates: formation of the male.--Primitivity of the female.--Minuscule males: the bonellie. --Regression of the male into the male organ: the cirripedes.--Generality of...

_II. Vertebrates:--Unnoticeable in fish, saurians, reptiles.--The Bird World.--Dimorphism favourable to males: the oriole, pheasants, the ruff.--Peacocks and turkey-cocks.--Bird...

_III. Vertebrates (continued).--Man and woman.--Characteristics and limits of human dimorphism.--Effects of civilization.--Psychologic dimorphism.--The insect world and the huma...

_Inferiority and superiority of the female as shown in animal species.--Influence of feeding on the production of sexes.--The female would have sufficed.--Feminism absolute, and...

_Sexual dimorphism and parallelism.--Sexual organs of man and of woman.--Constancy of sexual parallelism in the animal series.--External sexual organs of placentary mammifera.--...

1. _Copulation: vertebrates.--Its very numerous varieties and its specific fixity.--The apparent immorality of Nature.--Sexual ethnography.--Human mechanism.--Cavalage.--The for...

Among insects, batrachians, and mollusks one finds the most curious modes of fecundation and those furthest removed from the usual mechanism of mammals; before coming to that we...

_III. Of birds and fish.--Males without penis.--Coupling by simple contact.--Salacity of birds.--Copulation of batrachians: accoucheur toad, aquatic toad, earth toad, pipa toad....

Fish are the only vertebrates among whom one encounters hermaphrodism, either accidental: cyprins, herrings, scombers; or regular, sargue, sparaillon, seran. The myxines, very h...

_V. Artificial fecundation.--Disjunction of the secreting apparatus from the copulating apparatus.--Spiders.--Discovery of their copulative method.--Brutality of the female.--Ha...

_VI. Cannibalism in sex.--Females who devour the male, those who devour the spermatophore.--Probable use of these practices.--Fecundation by the whole male.--Loves of the white...

_Universality of the caress, of amorous preludes.--Their rôle in fecundation.--Sexual games of birds.--How cantharides caress.--Males' combats.--Pretended combats of birds.--Dan...

_Rarity of monogamy.--Taste for change in animals.-- Rôles of monogamy and polygamy in the stability or instability of specific types.--Strife of the couple against polygamy.--C...

_Organization of reproduction among hymenoptera.--Bees.--Wedding of the queen.--Mother bee, cause and consciousness of the hive.--Sexual royalty.--Limits of intelligence among b...

_Two sorts of sexual aberration.--Sexual aberrations of animals.--Those of men.--Crossing of species.--Chastity.--Modesty.--Varieties and localizations of sexual bashfulness.--A...

_Instinct.--Can one oppose it to intelligence?--Instinct in man.--Primordiality of intelligence.--Instinct's conservative rôle.--Modifying rôle of intelligence.--Intelligence an...

_Accord and discord between organs and acts.--Torses and sacred scarab.--The hand of man.--Mediocre fitness of sexual organs for copulation.--Origin of "luxuria."--The animal is...