feeding on the production of sexes.-The female would have sufficed.-Feminism abso

parasite, or provider, permanent master of the couple or the group, fugitive lover, a slave sacrificed by the female after the completion of her pleasure. All attitudes, and the same ones, are attributed by nature to either of the sexes; there is not, apart from the specific functions, a male or a female r?le. Both or eithe

and the buds into shoots. Richness of means, well-being, intensive feeding abolish sex, but the last to be affected is the female, which in sum, perseveres obscurely in the unsexed plant, forced back to its primitive means of reproduction, or to reproduction by slip cutting. If excessive alimentation tends to suppress the male, it would then appear that the separation into two sexes is a means of diminishing the costs of the total being. The monoic type is a ste

e general fecundity: whether we treat of man or of apple-trees, the male element in- or de-creases according to famine or abundance of nourishment. But the human race is not sufficiently plastic for the variation of births to be ever very great between the two sexes; and no warm-blooded animal is sufficiently plastic

ial damage be reduced to the r?le of mere fecundating apparatus. The number of males could, and even should in such case, diminish with due rapidity, but then human society would in- or decline toward the type represented by that of social bees: continual labour being incompatible with the periods of maternity, the feminine sex would atrophy, a single female would be elevated to the dignity of queen and mother, the rest of the population would work stupidly for an ideal exterior to its own sensibility. Even more radical transformations would not be anti-natural. Virgin-birth might establish itself: certain males could be born in each century, as happens in the intellectua

versity of animal habits. Human parthenogenesis is less absurd: it offers an order, and promiscuity is a disorder. But social promiscuity is impossible by the further reason that woman, the more feeble, would be crushed by it. She struggles against man only, thanks to the privileges which man concedes her, when troubled by sexual ine

ate feminism, one could more easily accept feminism in excess. For if there are in n