MASCULINE MOTHERS PRODUCE EMASCULATE SONS BY MISAPPROPRIATING THE LIFE-POTENTIAL OF MALE OFFSPRING

"The truth, when it is discovered, is what every one has known."

I

Mendel found that the hybrid plants resulting from his cross-breedings of Dominants with Recessives produced, when mated with similar hybrids, sex-cells of pure Dominant and sex-cells of pure Recessive types, and, moreover, a proportion of sex-cells of mixed type, corresponding to the grey rabbit-offspring of a black rabbit that has mated with a white.

So too, are found among humans, four types of men and women such as might be expected under my application of Mendelian doctrine: Homozygotes for Traits, or pure typical men and women—Dominant males and Recessive females, respectively; and Heterozygotes for Traits, or mixed types—Dominant females and Recessive males.

Of the pure Masculine type, are men who are wholly male in body, mind and bent; active, energetic, enterprising; pioneers of material progress; State-builders, city-builders, trade-builders, financiers, explorers, soldiers, men of affairs. Of the Mixed type, are men who, while being virile of body and mind, possess nevertheless a greater admixture of womanly quality than is strictly normal. These are the artists, poets, writers, doctors, priests, philanthropists.

Among women also, are two kindred orders; the wholly womanly—pure unalloyed types of natural woman, wife and mother, sister, friend; and women who, while being wholly womanly too in attribute and trend, possess, nevertheless, underlying manly faculties which give broader scope and effectiveness to abstract and impersonal issues of their own sex-characteristics. These are the artists and poets and writers who present the Woman point of view. They are the Florence Nightingales, the Charlotte BrontËs, Mary Somervilles; the philanthropists, reformers, born physicians, teachers, nurses, and so forth; whose part it is to mother, befriend and inspire humanity at large rather than to minister to individuals. Whose part it is, as well, to extend the tender, purifying ethics of Woman and The Home ever further and more deeply into public life, public work, and public administration.

Such men and women possess the characteristics of their own sex fully differentiated, but tinctured and fructified by more than a normal quotum of the characteristics of the other. They are quite normal, however, and are wholly invaluable in their contribution to the world's affairs. Admirably manly or womanly, they bear but little likeness to the hereditarily-defective or to the artificially-manufactured species—mannish women and womanish men. They deviate from the essential Man and Woman types by degrees of overlapping in the higher mental attributes. In all the main characteristics of Sex, physical, mental and functional, they are completely men and women. The abnormal mixed types are, on the contrary, more or less degenerate, structurally, functionally and mentally. These persons of natural Mixed Types are Nature's workers rather than the parents of her Races. The daily round is too restricted for them. Their abilities and bent claim wider fields. The home cannot contain them. It is too round to fit their angles. They are hampered by its reciprocities, stifled by its personal atmosphere, restive beneath its obligations. And not seldom they succeed in making homes as uncomfortable for others as they themselves find such.

These Heterodox—of which mould Genius is—are indispensable to spur and quicken human progress, while adding nothing to the personal evolution of the Human Type. They advance the standards and the ethics of Humanity by creating ideals in Art, in Literature, in Politics, in Reform and Philanthropy. But only too often they fall short, in their own lives, of the standards and ideals they establish for the world at large.

The Advance-guard of Faculty, they break new ground of Mind and Morale for others to cultivate. Although they themselves frequently quarrel with life, they make life in general greater and happier for their fellows. If women, they possess much of the initiative and energy, the intellect and chivalry of men. But they apply these to womanly ends. If men, they possess much of the insight and sympathy, the altruism and creativeness of women. But they devote these to manly achievements.

Herbert Spencer held that Genesis (or reproductive power) and Individuation (or Self-development) exist in inverse ratio. Which is because individuation beyond the normal can only be achieved by drawing upon the vital potential of offspring. Hence, these strong individualities of Mixed Type—because reproductive power is diminished in them—but seldom transmit their abilities to offspring. Genius is frequently sterile. Otherwise, its children are of inferior calibre.

It is in imitation, doubtless, of the natural Mixed Types—which may be described as a normal deviation from The Normal—that the cult of the mannish woman is being cruelly and disastrously forced upon our latter-day girls and women; resulting in wholly deplorable developments.

The woman of natural Mixed-type is essentially womanly in aim and bent. She does womanly work with virile energy and masculine mental grip. But she never (or seldom) assumes male proclivities or adopts male habits; crazes to wear trousers, to ride astraddle, to smoke, spit, swear, stride, talk slang, or shoot living sentient creatures. Nor does she otherwise exchange the more highly-evolved and delicate morale and manners of woman for those of the male. In Art, in Literature, in Science; in Industry and Reform, her aims and work preserve the womanly mode and outlook.

II

In consequence of doctrine which, for several generations, has trained women to develop for their own uses the masculine potential belonging to sons, many of our present-day boys and girls are seen actually to have exchanged their natural sex-characteristics. Boys are born now, puny, neurotic, and effeminate; while girls are strong and male and masterful. And it is precisely in the families whereof the girls are strong and male and masterful, that the boys are weakly and effeminate; the degenerative lapse from The Normal expressing itself, in both sexes, in terms of abnormal characteristics of the other sex.

That at thirteen, girls now-a-days are taller and heavier than boys of the same age has been established by the Anthropometrical Committee of the British Association.

Dr. J. J. Heslop, after carefully observing the health and the physical growth of children in fourteen elementary schools belonging to the Stretford (Lancashire) Education Authority, has published a striking return of his investigations. The following table shows the average height and weight at this age:

The most notable development among girls takes place between the eleventh and thirteenth years.

The opposite bias in this abnormal substitution of alien sex-traits is due presumably, in both sexes, to an antagonising and neutralising of the qualities normal to the one sex by emergence of those of the other. Thus, the boy is puny and emasculate because his impoverished maleness is too feeble to dominate the Female traits inherent in him, as is normal to males. The girl is big and crude and masterful because her impoverished Womanliness is inadequate to inhibit and refine her inherent Male traits.

The aims of Feminism are being realised in unforeseen developments. Because in addition to extinguishing the most beautiful and inspiring order of human qualities, this masculinising of women is burdening the Race and deteriorating type by producing an ever-increasing number of neurotic, emasculate men and boys.

III

The present-day Mortality-rate of boy-babies has become increasingly and alarmingly high.

The mortality-rate of males is higher always than is that of females, because of the greater hardships and dangers of men's pursuits. This is one of the reasons why, although, normally, boys are born in greater number (about 1050 to every 1000 girls) the female (pre-war) population of England and Wales exceeded the male population by the huge majority of 1,205,311.

But the excess of male over female infant-mortality has greatly increased of late years. In 1860 it was only 9 per cent. In 1913 it had leapt to the high figure of 23 per cent. And this diminishing vital power of males begins before birth even, 180 boys being born prematurely as compared with 145 girls. Of boys born, 7 die from inborn physical defects, as compared with 6 girls. While, before the age of three months, 4 boys die to every 3 girls. Among 1000 infants dying before they are a year old, only 96 are girls, as compared with 120 boys. Recent statistics show that in rural Westmoreland, 48 boys under a year old died, while only 21 girls of the same age succumbed. In Wiltshire, the ratio was 135 boys to 78 girls.

To quote from a writer on these startling statistics of the Registrar-General:—

"Tuberculous diseases, convulsions, intestinal troubles, bronchitis and pneumonia, and other maladies, all kill more boy than girl-infants in their first year. The figures are surprising. Omitting fractions, we find that among 1000 infants of each sex 21 boys die of intestinal troubles to 17 girls; 10 boys die of convulsions to 8 girls; 21 boys die from bronchitis and pneumonia to 17 girls; and 14 boys from other causes to 11 girls. Whooping-cough stands alone, carrying off 3·15 girls to 2·65 boys. Even when chloroform or ether is given for the purposes of an operation it kills more boys than girls."

It may be objected that, according to my view, the mortality of girls, bred of constitutionally impoverished males, should likewise have increased. But this high mortality among boy-infants and children must so weed out the weakliest males that many of these do not live to become fathers. Moreover, by developing into abnormal dominance the male potential in her, the mother de-vitalises sons more than she de-vitalises daughters.

Further, these crude hoyden-sisters of the weakly boys fail rather in the higher attributes of Sex than in mere survival-power. They survive, but they are marred in type by the stigmata of sex-immaturity or abnormality.

Increasing sex-impoverishment is bringing into vogue—almost as a matter of routine—the performance on male infants of an unnatural (and a degenerative) Jewish rite.

IV

Of the many theories advanced to explain the determination of Sex in offspring, the true one is, undoubtedly, the relative parental power of the respective parents.

Normally, this being well-balanced, the ratio of the sexes is about equal; the preponderance being on the male side, however, owing to the maternal parental potential being normally greater, because conserved by reason of her less onerous rÔle in life. When parental potential is relatively greater in the father, female offspring is born. When greater in the mother, male offspring results. In the families of men notably virile, daughters preponderate. In those of women notably womanly, sons are in the majority. (Presuming in such case the parent of the other sex to be of average potence.)

The preponderance of male-births during War-conditions is due to the fact that by far the greater stress of these conditions, with consequent depletion of vital reserves, falls upon the males. Hence the women—who although depleted likewise by the increased demands upon them, are less vitally exhausted than the men are—become relatively prepotent in parental potential. The more virile men being absent on military duty, moreover, the less virile members of the sex it is who preponderate in the paternal rÔle.

Other parental factors, as of age, health and circumstance, which affect the sex of offspring, do so indirectly by their effects upon the relative vital and parental potential of mother and father.

In corroboration of the view that power conserved in the mother engenders Maleness and masculine vigour in offspring, I have received the following letter from the Head-mistress of the village-school of Corley:

"I was much interested in your article re Boy-babies. I think my school here is unique, there being 86 children on the roll, of whom 57 are boys and 29, girls. And of the children in the village who will be of age for admission this year, 7 are boys and 3, girls.

"In the village there are several families composed of boys only.

One family has 7 boys and 2 girls.

One family has 6 boys and 0 girls.

Two families have 5 boys and 1 girl each.

Two families have 4 boys and 1 girl each.

"Of one family reckoning 6 boys (1 dead; making 7 in all) the mother has but one leg—the other having been amputated when she was fourteen.[2] None of the mothers here (so for as I can learn) do work outside their homes; except in odd cases, an odd day's washing or cleaning.

"None do regular work on farms, or otherwise.

"All the children are well-fed, clean and well clothed. Our Medical Nurse says she finds the finest babies here—of the whole of her district. For 57 years the yearly returns in School have shown a great preponderance of boys over girls."

The writer contrasts this Utopian order of things with her experience of the rickety and otherwise diseased and defective states of school-children whose mothers were employed in factories.

V

It would seem that the embryological development of the male brain and nervous system, it is which demands more of vital expenditure on the part of the mother than does that of the female brain; less elaborately differentiated as is this in respect of concrete intellection and physical adaptation.

For this reason, not only is more constitutional vitality on the mother's part required for the production of sons—and more particularly of virile sons—but the production of male offspring entails more stress, and exacts a greater toll, physical and psychical, than does the ante-natal nurture of the female embryo. Mothers who have borne female children with but little constitutional strain or suffering may be greatly debilitated, even invalided, during pregnancy with male offspring. One finds women permanently weakened in constitution and function, indeed, from the strain of producing a male. In such cases, the male may be exceptional of type. Or the mother may be of exceptionally low vitality.

It has been argued that defect and degeneracy, as hare-lip, cleft-palate, clubbed or webbed-foot, are more common in the male because he is normally less highly-developed than the female is. The contrary is obviously the case. In creating a difficult and a simpler thing, there will necessarily be more failures in the difficult than in the simpler product. Being nearer to Nature, the female is usually more true to the normal type of species. But the type is not so fully differentiated, or specialised in relation to environment, as is the male.

It is significant that the female aphis, when its vital potential is stimulated by summer heat, is able to breed without co-operation of the male, but breeds females only. Supporting not only the view that the female is the rootstock of species, while the male is, so to speak, an alien grafted upon it, but indicating too, that the production of females represents less output of reproductive energy, since one sex alone is able to accomplish this.

VI

Absence both of womanly emotion and of spiritual attribute disqualifies the faces of the greater number of our modern "beauties" from being truly beautiful. They lack those last exquisite touches which psychical qualities bestow; sweetness, tenderness, gaiety, pensiveness, mystery, mockery, witchery, wistfulness, surrender, resistance, maidenhood, motherhood—the celestial and the terrestrial melting into one another like the colours of the rainbow.

Since evolution is advancing in some stock, modern beauty is, no doubt, of higher calibre than has been attained in any previous epoch. But for the most part, the faces of our handsome women are pre-eminently pagan—bold, sophisticated, clever; without sweetness, softness, imagination, sensitiveness—in a word, without Soul. The outlines, howsoever fine, are hard and antipathetic in their uncompromising firmness. The eyes are cold and critical and challenging, so that their relentless gaze is sometimes rather of the nature of a blow than it is a sympathy.

Owing to that setting of the jaw which attends strong muscular action, the shaping bones of the faces of developing girls thicken and coarsen, and the naturally delicate, beautiful contours of chin and of cheek deteriorate to the crude and heavy lower jaws characteristic of a very large order of the sex to-day.

The weak receding, or the sharply-pointed chin of the over-feminised type—both early-Victorian and modern—errs in the other direction. To give fine balance to the face and form—as to the mind—the Male traits must be duly represented. These broaden and strengthen the curves, and preserve them from lapsing to narrowness and feebleness; lending touches of straightness and firmness which nobly enhance the graces. In excess, they mar and deface, however; as is exemplified in the strong and slovenly features, without drawing or delicacy, which characterise the new type of girl being turned out by our schools and colleges, most of which make now-a-days a speciality of sports. Similar heavy jaws and blunt, amorphous features are replacing in our working-girls, de-sexed by masculine employments, the classic, nobly-modelled lineaments which made our Anglo-Saxon Race once the most beautiful, as it was the most vigorous and enterprising, of the nations. Such faces may be deplorably senseless for the sense—and lack of sensibility—in them.

The facial type of the opposite extreme is ultra-feminine—a cameo-like reversion to an earlier Victorian physiognomy, to which several generations of mothers have failed to add any new quality. But, unlike its Victorian prototype, the modern ultra-feminine face lacks blood and emotion, and shows like a faded attenuation thereof. The cold, delicate features, with the pinched nostrils which, owing to adenoid obstruction, have never expanded to a full, inspiring breath of Life, suggest further cameo-comparison; as being the daintily-carven shell of an extinct creature.

So devitalised and neurasthenic are many of our pretty young girls, that their flowerlike faces, topping over-tall and undeveloped bodies, suggest delicate blossoms crowning long attenuated, sapless stems. Neither faces nor bodies are vitalised and athrill with powers rooted in healthful organs; vivified by healthful functions, and instinct with warm, iron-rich, magnetic blood. They show that making for beauty which is inherent in the Woman-traits, but which, in latter-day girls, owing to defective constitutional vigour or to educational, social or industrial exhaustion, has been able to realise itself only in sickly and weed-like development.

Life manifests in these neurotics in the form of vivacities merely; not as vitalities.

Severed from their natural roots in Life and vital function, they resemble nothing more than charming cut-blossoms gracefully fading on drawing-room shelves.

The truth is that girls brought up on modern strenuous methods skip the years between 16 and 26. If young and fresh at 16, all at once we find them 26 in constitution and in temperament—a little lean, a little lined, a little wan, a little shrill, a little chill, and only too often more than a little disillusioned and cynical—in a word already passÉes. Some are, of course, an interesting and attractive 26, but the fresh, warm, vital and beautiful years from 17 to 27, the years of a natural woman's most charming bloom of mind and body, have dropped from their lives, like petals from roses. So that our girls in their 'teens require to hide the ravages of time by every sort of artifice. And at 26 in years, they are approaching the forties in constitution and temperament; are even keen on politics, cards, finance—resorts, pre-eminently, of materialistic middle-age.

This blighting of young womanhood, with loss of youthful bloom and responsiveness, it is that has led to the decadent and demoralising vogue of the Flapper. Since, beyond all things, men seek vital youth and freshness in the other sex, to find it now-a-days, they must seek it in children.

VII

Deplorable are the degenerative processes by way of which those noble natural characteristics of the Woman-sex which Nature has achieved by ages of evolutionary advance may be observed to lapse, and are presently all but obliterated from the woman form and face.

Increasingly the curves straighten; the conflict between straight lines and curves occasioning wrinkles. The jaw squares. The lips lose womanly fullness, sweetness, and their natural colour and texture of rose-leaves; becoming thin and pale and stern. Shadows gather round them, foreshadowing, it may be, a masculine growth of hair. Hair loses lustre and grows sparse, particularly above the brows. The chin loses its feminine softness; rigidity and grimness being substituted. Eyes lose fullness, tenderness, brilliance, and woman's normal melting expression. The glance grows chill, hard, shrewd, direct. Crowsfeet mar the modelled lids. The serene, inspiring woman-brows are furrowed by the permanent frown of eye-strain or of nervous tension. The voice falls flat and metallic, or drops into gruffness and harshness; losing its delicate tuneful inflections, its sympathetic timbre, its joyous quality. The cheeks hollow; the white temples are wrecked.

In the faces of women whose systems are functioning healthfully, a number of exquisite artistries in cellular texture of skin and in tinting appear; the skin beneath the eyes differing from that of the cheeks, that of the brows differing from that of the chin, that above the mouth from that below, and so forth. In women subjected to constitutional strain, all these exquisite artistic differentiations—product of incalculable evolutionary developments—are obliterated; the skin over the whole face becoming of the same grain and hue, as is normal to the male. The body becomes spare and sinewy, or set and spread; its movements heavy and abrupt. And more and more the hidden male emerges from the wreckage. The male right arm, swinging like a pendulum, suggests itself as being the motive-power of the ungraceful mechanism.

With the increasing maleness of physique, male mental proclivities develop; obsessions to wear trousers, to smoke, to stride, to kill, and otherwise to indulge the masculine bent.

* * * * *

It may be objected that Beauty takes too high a place in the counsels of this book. Beauty is Normality, however. Nature, in her every aim and handiwork, makes beyond every other thing for grace. Weed and moth, shell and beetle, humming-bird and dragon-fly—all are lovely in technique and artistry. Plainness and uncouthness in humans only too often belie noble mind or disposition. This results, however, from such failure of vital resources that the individual had fine material only to equip his mind, and none left over to adorn his body.

One sees the converse too, where all the available potential of beauty has been lavished on handsome exteriors.

Plainness is a mark of abnormality. The victim may be normal in other respects. But in this, he or she is abnormal. And more particularly she—since Woman is both medium and Creatrix of living harmony and grace. So is comeliness declining, however, that one of the specifications of a recent Baby-Competition was that beauty would not be a necessary qualification.

Yet Beauty is the natural birthright and The Normal of all babes and children.

VIII

The Male cult is impressed now at the earliest age. Some of our hapless little girls, in consequence of having been subjected early to strain of masculine drill, hockey, cricket and other rough and strenuous exertions, are more like colts or smaller-sized bullocks in their crude conformation and ungainly movements, as also in their crude mentality and manners, than they are like charming human maids.

Few developments in life are prettier or more engaging than is a natural little girl. The sex of her, with its fair Woman-attributes, reveals itself early in children of high organisation. Crowned by her curls, in her simple white frock, she is as fresh and dainty, as winsome and elusive as a fairy. Her little Woman-soul begins to make for beauty ere ever she can walk. Ere ever she can walk, she moves her limbs in rhythm of the dance. She tries to sing. She stretches out a tiny finger and reverently touches a bright colour—a blue ribbon, a gold button, a pink flower on a chintz. Set her in a field, she runs to cram her hands with daisies. She fills, within the House of Life, an exquisite small niche that nothing else can fill.

Yet now they are cropping her fair curls, are exchanging her white frock for masculine knickers. They are training her soft limbs and exquisite elastic movements to the hard and rigid action of the soldiers' drill and march; are teaching her to stride her pony that once she sat as prettily and lightly as a bird; are making a hard, boisterous tom-boy of her, with lusty, hairy limbs and uncouth manners; perverting all her natural highly-differentiated delicate attributes and graces to clumsy lower-grade form and activities.

They have robbed her of her Doll, whose helplessness and wax perfection fostered sentiments of worship, tenderness and ministry in her. They have given her a whipping-top, which—unlike the boy, who pleasures in the skill and mechanism of its handling—she lashes with contorted features and neurotic spitefulness.

With characteristic scorn of physical disability, Feminism contemns old age as disease or degeneracy—a weakness to be combated with latter-day strenuousness, cloaked by a counterfeit youthfulness, forced exertions (even games!) simulated youthful zests and gaieties.

Beyond all things, women are exhorted not to allow themselves to "grow old" as their grandmothers did, sitting, comely and tranquil and wise, at their quiet firesides.

Yet the truth is, Age is a natural beautiful phase; in its way, as natural, as healthful and as beautiful as are any of the younger seasons. Calm and stately as the snows of Nature's winter, as Nature's winter shows us, old age does not presage death—because there is no Death. That we call Death is but a temporary Recession from the Outer and Terrestrial to the Inner and Celestial zone of Being. And with the vital quietude and longer-sightedness of eyes, come spiritual quickening and longer-sightedness of mental view. So that both eyes and mind perceive The Outer more and more obscurely, focusing more and more on The Remote. The stream of life runs stilly for the reason that it runs more deep; centring again to that Within and Spiritual, whence it issued in Birth, and will issue again in re-Birth.

Compare such serene-faced, dignified age, cause to all of reverence and tenderness, for the mystery and pathos of its wise and tranquil resignation—Compare such with the restless, harried, malcontent old age of modern counsels!

IX

Before the advent of that admirable institution, the Eugenics Education Society, for the establishment of a new Science of Heredity, as, too, of a new propaganda of Race-Culture, vital and illuminating data, not only of supreme scientific interest but, moreover, of the greatest practical significance, passed, for the most part, unnoted.

I venture to believe, however, that Eugenic propaganda has been too much in the direction of eliminating defect from the Race by prohibiting marriage to the so-called "Unfit." Whereas the true way of Racial health, of normality and excellence, is, surely, to eliminate from life the many conditions, material, economic, and personal, which make for Unfitness—which preclude, indeed, the survival of little save Unfitness.

For since we are not in the secret of Nature's aims, and are wholly in the dark as to the human type for which she is aiming, to prohibit parenthood to any but the flagrantly abnormal, the insane and imbecile, the epileptic and the hopelessly-diseased, might be to quench the evolution of such higher Fitness as we are not qualified to foresee. That which shows like disability in one age may be the incipient ability of a later. In cruder, primitive days, when standards of Fitness were physical strength, rapacity and cunning, honesty and mercy, and more delicate organisation of body—the starting-points of new routes of evolutionary development—would have been condemned as worthy only of extermination.

In sickly and declining stock there may exist, moreover, an ebbing vein of rare faculty, which, re-vitalised by a due potential of maternal re-creative power, might come to throb with genius.

Realising all the factors—the innumerable lives, the incalculable personal traits, endeavours and experiences, that have gone to make the Individualism of any strain of stock, and realising that just these factors of Individualism can have occurred in one line only of human ascent and can never be repeated, it becomes clear that summarily to extinguish any human strain, by arbitrary prohibition, would be to exterminate a unique branch of the great Life-tree, and thereby to deprive the Race of a specialised route of further ascent; a route which no other stock could supply.

The fact that great families, with great histories and talents behind them, fall into decadence shows that even in decadent stock are inherences of greatness which might be recruited to greatness again. While apart from all this, the right of Parenthood, with the evolutionary impulse to character and faculty consequent upon the exercise of parental functions, is the birthright of every individual capable of fulfilling such. The counsel of Selective Parenthood is dangerous doctrine, indeed. Given Life, Nature by her methods of Disease is able to eliminate stock too deteriorate for, or beside her purpose. But she alone knows her purpose. And she alone can judge as to what is intrinsic Fitness for Survival.

Selective Parenthood makes, moreover, for the elimination of those valuable object-lessons of inherited defect and disease, whereby Nature points her inestimable morals of healthy and disciplined living. For evasion, too, of those penalties and burdens in the care and maintenance of the Unfit, which a nation justly incurs by such social wrongs and maladministrations as are largely responsible for disease and defect.

The doctrine of operative sterilisation is not only humanly repugnant but, in view of the psychological import of every physical function, it is essentially evil.

X

Some momentous morals of the Feminist trend are pointed by the Insect-world, which may be regarded as a devolutionary back-water, wherein Life is slowly ebbing toward extinction by fluctuating out in ever smaller, meaner, drabber, ineffective, pulseless and spectral existences—chill and teeming myriads unwarmed by the throb of emotion, unillumined by the light of Mind. Dust which, raised from dust by power of Life, has caught the trick of living, and goes on living and perpetuating, without cause or impulse other than age-old, time-worn mechanistic habit imparted by the state of living.

And in this phantom under-world of Decadence, cast by the shadow of Life and peopled with distorted images thereof, the females are Dominant—larger in size, stronger, more active, more enterprising and ferocious than the males. As in the world of Vegetation, by way whereof Matter first quickened into Life, so in this realm of InsectivorÆ by way of which Life is gravitating back to the inertia of Inorganic Matter, in ever shallower, denser and more sluggish strata, the male is seen as appanage and victim of the female.

In the beehive, he appears as ineffective drone amid a throng of strenuous neuter female-workers. And a female is his Queen.

Significant again is it that insect-females are seen increasingly to have emancipated themselves from mother-instincts and maternal functions, as regards nurture or affection for their young. The single process wherein the warring males and snarling females of finer fierce, evolving species sheathe their claws and mute their hates in a co-operative, self-effacing instinct—Reproduction, here in this disintegrating world of Devolution, functions without welding spark, or lighting gleam of parent-altruism. At best, it is as chill, as colourless and meticulously mechanical as the interminable tickings of a world of clockwork. At worst, it is a repulsive rapacity on the part of females to secure perpetuation. And this secured, they straightway sting the craven male to death, or tear him limb from limb and ghoulishly devour him.

Queen Bee leads her vassal suitors so strenuous and dizzying an ante-nuptial dance, for privilege of mating with her, that only one survives to claim the prize; the others dropping, dead and dying, in the wake of her murderous supremacy. And, as with other masculine and muscular females, her progeny are neuter working-females (sterile) and emasculate males (drones).

As Feminists demand for human babes, the Bee-mother hands over her offspring to be brought up by the State. While some other insect-mothers, having reposited their eggs (to serve as bombs that explode and devastate their living hosts) straightway abandon them, and return to the more strenuous and repulsive female-pursuits of this Phantasmagoria-world—a clockwork kingdom fabricated of Life's debris, and drably mimicking the throb and motion of its mechanism in ghoulish mockeries and vacuous reiterations; the while it runs down slowly, ticking back to the molecular vibration of mineral inertia.

END OF BOOK I

Note.—Mendelian and other readers interested in the more scientific aspects of the subject are referred to an Appendix at the end of this volume, in which these issues are further considered and some important evidences adduced.