-Generality of sexual dimorphism.-Superiority of the female in most insect species.-Exceptions.-Numeric dimorphism.-Female hymenoptera.-Multiplicity of her ac

ro-genital organs clearly resembling the female organs. To arrive at complete female estate they need undergo but a very slight modification; to become male they have to undergo a considerable and very complex transformation. The external genital organs of the female

f the female, stuck obliquely into her side, and justifying the name "two-headed worm" which has been given to this wretched and duplex animalculus. The female bonellie is a sea worm shaped like a sort of cornucopia sack fifteen centimetres in length: the male is represented by a minuscule filament of about one or two millimetres, that is to say about on

me, a regression of ovaries, abolition of nutritive functions; the stalk takes root in the living, nourishing milieu. But one organ, the male one, persists in these diminished cirripedes, and takes on enormous proportions, absorbing the whole of the animal. With only a slight further change one wo

attained a first place not intended by nature for him. It is probable that, relieved of all care, after the fecundation, he has had more leisure than the female wherein to develop his powers. It is also possible, and more probable, that these extremely diverse cases of resemblance and dissemblance are due to causes too numerous and too varied for us to seize their logical

those of the female; a difference found also among dioic plants. Hemp is a well known case, although the taller shoots which the peasants call male are in exact contrary, the females. The small garden-loving nettle has two sexes on the same stalk; the greater nettl

ediocre blade, lives, like a sword sheathed in the hollow stomach of the male. This timid life and its perpetual amours would horrify the bold female scarab?a, adroit chalicodomes, cold wise lycoses, and proud, terrible, a

and neuroptera. The male is provided with two large wings; the female has neither wings, feet, eyes, nor antenn?; is a small worm. After metamorph

disproportion in the mulberry bombyx, of which the female is much heavier than the male; she flies with difficulty, a passive beast who submits to a fecundation lasting several hours; likewise in the autumn butterfly, cheimatobia, the male sports two pairs of fine wings on a spindle body, the female is a gross fat keg with rudimentary wings, incapable of flight; she climbs difficultly into trees on whose buds her caterpillar feeds itself; in the case of another butterfly which one calls, absurdly, the orgye, the male has all t

he hymenoptera include bees, bumble-bees, wasps, scolies, ants, masons, sphex, bembex, osmies, etc. The place of these among insects is analogous to that of the primates or even of man among mammifers. But while woman, not animally inferior to her male, remains below him in nearly all intellectual activities, among the hymenoptera the female is both brain and the tool, the engineer, the working-staff, the mistress, mother, and nurse unless, as in the case of bees, she casts upon a third sex all duties not purely sexual. The males make love. The male of the tachyte, a sort of wasp rather like the sphex, is about eight times smal

a fine velvety black with deep violet wings. While the male loafs and bumbles she artfully and patiently rears the big-domed clay nest where her offspring pass their larv? days. This bee lives in colonies but the labour is

reat dart, stab him and pump out his crop. One may see the ferocious small animal knead the dead bee for half an hour, squeeze him like a lemon, drink him out like a gourd. Charming and candid habits of these winged topazes whirring among the flowers! Fabre has excused this sadique gourmandizing: the philanthe kills bees in order to feed her larv?, who have, however,

ed with a noisy apparatus for attracting the male's attention. The male of the cynips of the oak-apple, the terminal cynips, has a blond body with large diaphanous wings, the brown and black female

their shelters in stumps. White ants or termites[1] show very accentuated dimorphism; the female or queen having a head almost as large as that of a bee, a belly the thickness of one's finger, long in proportion, and growing to be fifteen times as large as the rest of her body. This sexual tub lays continuously without any let-up at the speed of an egg per second. The male, as in Baudelaire's vision of the giantess, live

such a quantity of music is unnecessary, and moreover if the female 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 Proven?al 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,

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 a

f 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 i

exes 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, a

ffy, 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 ma

uroptera, but their habits bring them

ntomologiques,