have grouped themselves in societies, where, however rudimentary they may be, we find in embryonic sketch the principal traits of human agglomerations. There are even species—as, for example, bees, ants, and termites—that have created true republics, of complicated structure, in which the social problem has been solved in an entirely original manner. We may take from them more than one good example, and more than one valuable hint.
My present task is to write the history of marriage and of the family. The institution of marriage has had no other object than the regulation of sexual unions. These have for their aim the satisfaction of one of the most imperious biological needs—the sexual appetite; but this appetite is only a conscious impulse, a "snare," as Montaigne calls it, which impels both man and animal to provide, as far as concerns them, for the preservation of their species—to "pay the ancestral debt," according to the Brahmanical formula. Before studying the sexual relations, and their more or less regulated form in human societies, it will not be out of place to say a few words on reproduction in general, to sketch briefly its physiology in so far as this is fundamental, and to show how tyrannical are the instincts whose formation has been determined by physiological causes, and which render the fiercest animals mild and tractable. This is what I shall attempt to do in the following chapter.
II. Reproduction.
Stendhal has somewhere said that the beautiful is simply the outcome of the useful; changing the phrase, we may say that generation is the outcome of nutrition. If we examine the processes of generation in very simple organisms, this great function seems to answer to a superabundance of nutritive materials, which, after having carried the anatomic elements to their maximum volume, at length overflows and provokes the formation of new elements. As long as the new-born elements can remain aggregated with those which already constitute the individual, as long as the latter has not acquired all the development compatible with
