Chapter 8 LOVE-ORGANS

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.-Form and position of the penis.-The penial bone.-The clitoris.-The vagina.-The teats.-Forked prong of marsupials.-Sexual organs of reptiles.-Fish and birds with a penial organ-Genital organs of arthropodes.-Attempt to classify animals according to the disposition, presence, absence of exterior organs for reproduction.

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Sexual dimorphism, physic as well as psychic, has evidently one sole cause, sex; nevertheless the organs which differ least from male and female among species which differ most, are precisely the sexual organs. That is, they are rigorously made the one for the other, and the accord in this case must be not only harmonic, but mechanical and mathematical. They are cog-wheels which must bite one on the other with exactitude, be it, as in birds, that there is but an exact superposition of two orifices, be it, as in mammals that the key must enter the keyhole. There is a dimorphism, but it is that of the mould to the cast, of the scabbard to the blade; for the parts where the contact is less strict, the parallelism is nevertheless quite sensible and quite apparent. This similitude in difference has struck philosophers as well as anatomists in all ages from the logical insinuations of Aristotle to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's theory of analogies. Galien had already noted certain analogies, more or less exact: greater labia, and foreskin, ovaries and testicles, scrotum and matrice. He says, textually: "All parts of man are found in woman; there is but one point of difference, woman's parts are interior, man's exterior, parting from the perineal region. Imagine those which first present themselves to mind, no matter which, unfold woman's or fold man's inward and you will find either a replica of the other. Suppose first man's organs pushed into him and extending interiorly between the rectum and the vessie; in this supposition the scrotum would occupy the place of the matrice, with the testicles placed at each side of the exterior orifice. The prong of the male would become the throat of the cavity thus produced, and the skin of the prong's extremity, called the foreskin would form the vagina. Suppose, inversely, that the matrice should turn inside out and fall outside, would not its testicles (ovaries) of necessity, find themselves inside its cavity and would not it envelop them as a scrotum? Would not the throat, hidden up to the perineum, become the male member, and the vagina, which is but a cutaneous appendix of the throat, the foreskin?" This is the passage which Diderot has transposed and put au courant with science in his Rêve d'Alembert. This page of literary anatomy retains its expressive value: "Woman has all man's parts, the sole difference is like that between a purse hanging outside and a purse stuffed inside; a female foetus resembles a male foetus, so as to deceive anyone; the part which occasions the error, sinks in the female foetus in measure as the purse extends inward; it is never obliterated to the point of losing its primitive form; it also is the mover of pleasure, it has its gland, its foreskin, and one notes at its extremity a point which appears to have been the orifice of a urinary canal which has closed; there is in man from the anus to the scrotum, the interval called the perin?um, and from the scrotum to the end of the prong, a seam which looks like the resewing of a basted vulva; women with excessive clitoris, have beards, eunuchs have not, their thighs increase, their hips widen, their knees round out, and in losing the characteristic organization of one sex they seem to return to the characteristic conformity of the other...." In terms less literary, one considers as homologous, in man and woman, the ovary and the testicle, lesser labia, clitoridian cap and sheath, the hanging foreskin; the greater labia and the envelope of the scrotum; clitoris and penis; the vagina and the prostatic utricle. One will find the details of these analogies in special works, they can not be given here with scientific precision. The sole point to hold on to is that the two sexes not only in man, and not only in mammifers, but in nearly all the animal and vegetable series, are but a repetition of the same creature with specialization of function. This specialization may extend to functions other than sexual, to work (bees, ants) to war (termites). The soldier termite is extraordinary; he is not more so than the male.

The sexual parallelism is constant among nearly all vertebrates and arthropodes; it extends to identity among hermaphrodite mollusks if one then compare not two sexes but two individuals. It extends, for each sex considered separately, along the whole zo?logical chain. Parting from link animals which separate into two parts, one sees the sexual organs design themselves in the form wherein they arrive in higher animals of great complexity, such that, in acquiring differences of form and position they retain a remarkable stability of structure; one would say almost of identity in marsupials, reptiles, fish, birds. For clarity one must proceed from the known to the unknown; man is the figure to whom one may compare necessarily the observations on other animals.

There is no lack of point in knowing the normal love-mechanism, since moralists pretend to regulate its movements. Ignorance is tyrannic; the inventors of natural ethics knew very little of nature: this permitted them to be severe; for no definite piece of knowledge interfered with the certitude of their gestures. One becomes more discreet when one contemplates the prodigious picture of the erotic habits of the animal world, and even entirely incompetent to decide flatly, yes or no, whether a fact is natural or unnatural.

Man is a placentary mammifer: by this title his genital organs and their mode of employ are common to him and to all hairy animals having teats and an umbilicus. He is not normally covered all over with hair, but there is hardly a spot on his body where hairs may not sprout, and both sexes are hairy often with extreme abundance in pubis and arm-pits. The male and active organ of mammifers is the penis, usually completed exteriorily by the testicles. The penis is, at once, the excreting conductor of urine and sperm; an analogous relation exists in the female, and it is with exactitude that these mingled organs have been called genito-urinary or more recently, uro-genital; it is the same in all the animal series, the urethra opens exteriorily or it ends, as in birds, in a cloaca, vestibule, for all the excretions.

The penis of two-handed (bimanous) creatures descends freely, it hangs before the pubis in quadrumanes, and in chiroptera (bats). The bat is strangely like man, and like primates in general: five fingers to the hand, one a thumb, five fingers on the foot, pectoral teats, mensual flux, free penis; it is a little caricature of man, abrupt and frightened in its evening flight about houses. Among flesh-eaters, ruminants, pachyderms, solipedes and several other families of mammals, the penis is sheathed in a scabbard which stretches along the belly; thus preserved against accidents and insect stings, while its sensibility is maintained intact. Voyagers, according to Buffon, have seen Patagonians trying to get like results by tying the 'foreskin above the gland, like a bag with a cord. Thus man's hand permits him to improve or mutilate his body. Mutilation and sexual deformations, circumcision among Semites and savages, excision of Russian illuminati, transversal perforation of the gland, surgical flattening of the prong, are very frequent. The hand of the chiroptera is shackled, that of quadrumanes has only one sexual r?le, masturbation. It may also serve as a shield against external danger; many quadrumanes, better protected, make the same use of their tail when they curl it between their legs, this is sometimes a psychological gesture, female modesty or refusal, sometimes a gesture of preservation. The movements of Venus modest, of man coming naked from his bath, have no other origin. Monkeys when they stop moving about, place their hands on their sexual parts. The Polynesians, before Christianity, had the custom when standing upright, of holding their scrotum in both hands with the prong hanging between the fingers: the posture of the wild dandy. Certain species lack scrotum as Pliny had already remarked: Testes elephanto occulti. In camels the testicles roll beneath the skin of the groin; rats' testicles are internal, but emerge in the rutting season and assume an enormous development. Apes often have the pouch-skin blue, red or green, like the other bald parts of their bodies.

Camels, dromedaries and cats have the end of the penis bent backward (this explains the tom-cat's manner of urination), the tip does not straighten itself or point forward save in erection. Not only the prong but the sheath of rodents points backward and ends near the anus, and in front of it. The penis is slender in ruminants, and in wild boar; thick and round in solipedes, elephant, lamentin (sea-cow, manatee); thick and conic in the dolphin, cylindrical in rodents and primates. The gland, which takes all intermediary forms between ball and point, has in the rhinoceros the shape of a gross fleur-de-lys. In the cats small spikes rise and point toward the base, and in agouti and gerboa there are holding flanges which grip the organs of the female.

The prong of many mammifers, a real member, is held up by an interior bone, formed at the cost of the conjunctive partition which separates the two hollow chambers. This penial bone is found in many quadrumanes, chimpanzees, orang-outangs, most carnivora, dogs, wolves, felines, martin, otter, badger, among rodents, beaver, seal, and cetaceous animals; it is lacking in ruminants, pachyderms, insectivora, toothless animals. In man one sometimes finds a trace of it in the form of a slender prismatic cartilage. In the enormous penis of the whale it resembles a bell-clapper. The penial bone diminishes the erectile capacity of the prong in stopping the development of the hollow chambers, but it assures the rigidity of the member, obtained in the other penial type by the inflow of blood which causes the swelling. Man ought to have the penial bone; he has lost it in the course of ages, and this is doubtless fortunate, for a permanent rigidity, or one too easily obtained would have increased, to madness, the salacity of his species. It is perhaps for this reason that great apes are rare, although they are strong and agile. This view would be confirmed if the penial cartilage were found regularly in very lustful men or with a certain frequency among human races most addicted to eroticism.

The penis is found in woman in the form of clitoris. This is almost as voluminous as a true penis in quadrumanes; it is atrophied in other species. It varies individually in women, certain of them being in this respect quadrumanes. Sometimes the clitoris is pierced for the passage of the urethra (certain apes and the mole); a slight trace of this meatus is seen at the head of the woman's clitoris. In species whose males possess a penial bone the female has often a clitoridian bone; nothing more clearly affirms the parallelism of these two organs, whereof one serves only for pleasure, after having been, perhaps in a long distant era, when man romped among marine invertebrates, a real instrument of fecundation. The greater labia, limiting the general orifice of the vulva, exist only in woman and, less markedly, in the female orang-outang. Circular in rodents, transversal in the unique case of the hyena, a heteroclite animal, the vulva is longitudinal in all other mammifers. Completely imperforate in the mole the vagina is more or less closed by a membrane, which the male penis tears in first encounter, in women, and several quadrumanes, certain small monkeys, the marmoset, certain carnivora, the bear, hyena, white-bellied seal, the daman (nailed); it is replaced in dog, cat, ruminants by an annular gripping between the vagina and the vestibule. The maidenhead is, therefore, not peculiar to human virgins, and there is no glory in a privilege which one shares with the marmoset.

Menstruation is found in quadrumanes, in bats; other female mammals show an emission of blood, which is, however, limited to the rutting season. The position of teats is variable, as also their number, they are in the groin in ruminants, solipedes, cetaces; ventral in dogs, pigs; pectoral and always two in nearly all primates, chiroptera, elephants, and sirenians, who for this reason, doubtless, reminded the sailors of the ancient world of their women.

Other particularities and correspondences are examined in the next chapter which deals with the mechanism of love, and the method used by divers animals to make use of their organs according to the commandment of nature. There remain for consideration the lesser mammals and other vertebrates whose fecundatory instruments resemble those of mammifera.

In man and other placentaires, the forked prong is a teratological fact only encountered in incomplete double monsters. It is, on the contrary, the most general form among marsupials. A double vagina corresponds to this penis, double at least from the gland, thus in kangaroo and opossum. This original biparity is found regularly in the uterus of certain placentaires, hares, rats, bats, carnivora. The uterus of marsupials is simple without narrowing of the throat. One knows that their young stay there but a short time, that they are born not as foetus but as germs, and complete their development in the marsupial pouch. An opossum, destined to attain about the size of a cat, is at birth about bean-size. These animals, therefore, differ profoundly from other mammifera.

Some reptiles, like crocodiles and most chelonians, have only a simple prong; some tortoises have a forked tip to the penis, it is many-branched in the trionix, carnivorous tortoise rightly called ferocious. The saurians and ophidians can deploy outside the cloaca two erectile prongs; in saurians, lizards, they are short, round and bristle with prickles. The females have no clitoris save when the male has a single prong; at least the clitoris is only well constituted in crocodilians and chelonians.

Copulation is unknown to batrachians, whose contact is nevertheless very dose; it is unknown to most fish, whose amours are without even contact. Certain selacians however (dogfish, skates), and perhaps also one or two teleostians (bony fish), and the lamprey, have a copulating organ which really enters the organ of the female.

The birds which have a penis or an erectile and retractile tubercle which serves, are the ostrich, the cassowary, the duck, the swan, the goose, the bustard, the mandou and certain neighbouring species; their hens have a ditoridian organ. The ostrich has a true prong, five or six inches in length, cut by a groove which serves as conduit for the seminal liquor; it is enormous in erection and tongue-shaped. The ostrich hen has a clitoris and coition occurs exactly as among mammals. The swan and duck are also very well provided with an erectile tubercle suited for copulation, and this explains at once the story of Leda, the libidinous reputation of the duck, and his exploits in the barn-yards, veritable abbeys of Thélème.

One can not here describe the copulative organs of arthropodes, comprising insects properly so-called. Enough to note that, however varied their forms, they behave very much as those of superior mammifers and are composed of two essential parts, the penis, sheathed in a penial scabbard, and the vagina, prolonged by the copulative pouch which receives the penis. Fish and birds, lacking external apparatus are reduced to methods which will be later examined. Hermaphrodite mollusks, with a marvellously complicated sexual apparatus, ought also to be studied separately. Finally, the amorous habits of insects form a series of illustrative chapters.

From here, taking count only of exterior male organs or of organs which, internal when at rest, emerge at the moment of coition, one may attempt a vague and new classification of animal series.

1. Presence of penis, or of an erectile copulating tubercle: placentary mammals from man to marsupials exclusively; certain runners and palmipedes; crocodilians, chelonians, certain selacians, arthropodes, the rotifera.

2. Presence of a forked penis: marsupials, saurians, chelonians; scorpionides.

3. Disjunction of the secreting apparatus from the copulating apparatus: spiders, dragon-flies.

4. Absence of penis, copulation by contact: monotremes (omithoryncus), birds, batrachians, crustaceans.

5. No copulation; exterior fecundation of eggs: fish, echinoderms.

6. Indirect transmission of sperm with or without contact (by the spermatophore): cephalopodes, orthoptera.

7. Hermaphrodism: mollusks, tuniciers, worms.

8. Monagamous reproduction: protozoaires, and certain of the last metazoaires.

One needs many discriminations and exceptions to make this table more precise. It is however, not untrue, although incomplete and lacking nuances, and it permits one to see: that the separation of sexes by well characterized copulating apparatus is not a sign of animal superiority, although it is found among the most gifted animals; that birds with their genital system merely sketched in, seem to represent a type elevated in nature by the simplicity of organs and it means: that the sexes in animals who are without copulation either profound or superficial, tend, as in fish, to remain without difference; that all other modes of copulation are attributed exclusively to inferior species; that hermaphrodism was but a trial limited to a category of creatures lacking everything not exclusively designed for the process of reproduction; that the absence of sex characterizes only the earliest forms of life.

If one considers no longer the mode of copulation but the apparatus itself, with the male part, penis, and the female part, vagina, one sees clearly that these extremely particular organs are hardly found well designed save in two great branchings where the intelligence is most developed: mammifera and the arthropodes. There might be, perhaps, a certain correlation between complete and profound copulation and the development of the brain.

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