emale
searches for the green plants which will ensure a long caterpillar
life for her offspring. There she deposits her fecundated eggs in
considerable numbers and then expires in her turn, like a faded flower
which has fulfilled the object of its existence and falls after
leaving the fruit in its place.

The French naturalist _Fabre_ has described these phenomena, relying
on conclusive experiments, and my own observations and those of other
naturalists confirm them fully. Among the ants, all the males die
also, soon after an aerial nuptial flight, in which copulation is
generally polyandrous, one male hardly waiting for the preceding one
to discharge his semen before taking his place. Here the female
possesses a receptacle for semen which often contains the sperm of
many males, and which allows it to fecundate the eggs one after
another for several years as she lays them, and thus to act as the
mother of an ant's nest during a period which may extend to eleven or
twelve years, or even more.

In the lower organisms, love consists only in sexual instinct or
appetite. As soon as the function is accomplished love disappears. It
is only in the higher animals that we see a more or less durable
sympathy develop between the two sexes. However, here also and even in
man the sexual passion intoxicates for the moment all the senses. In
his sexual rut even man is dominated as by a magic influence, and for
the time he sees the world only under the aspect inspired by this
influence. The object loved appears to him under celestial colors,
which veil all the defects and miseries of reality. Each moment of his
amorous feeling inspires sentiments which it seems to him should last
eternally. He swears impossible things and believes in immortal
happiness. A reciprocal illusion transforms life momentarily into
mirages of paradise. The most common things, and even certain things
which usually disgust him, are then the object of the most violent
desire. But, as soon as the orgasm is ended and the appetite satisfied
the feeling of satiety appears. A curtain falls on the scene, and, at
least for the moment, repose and reality reappear.

Such are, in a few words, the general phenomena of the normal sexual
appetite among sexual organisms in the whole of living nature. I am
not speaking here of degenerations, such as onanism and prostitution.
Let us now analyze this appetite further.

The natural appetites are inherited instincts the roots o