least, that if the males exist at all, they must be excessively rare, and their services can be dispensed with; a conclusion which becomes acceptable when we learn that bees, moths, plant-lice (Aphides), and our grotesque friend Daphnia (Fig. 9) lay eggs which may be reared apart, will develop into females, and these will produce eggs which will in turn produce other females, and so on, generation after generation, although each animal be reared in a vessel apart from all others.
While on this subject, I cannot forbear making a reflection. It must be confessed that our sex cuts but a poor figure in some great families. If the male is in some families grander, fiercer, more splendid, and more highly endowed than the female, this occasional superiority is more than counterbalanced by the still greater inferiority of the sex in other families. The male is often but a contemptible partner, puny in size, insignificant in powers, stinted even of a due allowance of organs. If the peacock and the pheasant swagger in greater splendour, what a pitiful creature is the male falcon—no falconer will look at him. And what is the drone compared with the queen bee, or even with the workers? What figure does the male spider make beside his large and irascible female,—who not unfrequently eats him? Nay, worse than this, what can be said for the male Rotifer, the male Barnacle, the male Lernæa—gentlemen who cannot even boast of a perfect digestive apparatus, sometimes not of a digestive organ at all? Nor is this meagreness confined to the digestive system only. In some cases, as in some male Rotifers, the usual organs of sense and locomotion are wanting;[1] and in a parasitic Lernæa, the degradation is moral as well as physical: the female lives in the gills of a fish, sucking its juices, and the ignoble husband lives as a parasite upon her!
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Fig. 11.
Volvox Globator, with eight volvoces enclosed (Magnified).
But this digression is becoming humiliating, and meanwhile our hands are getting benumbed with cold. In spite of that, I hold the jar up to the light, and make a background of my forefingers, to throw into relief some of the transparent animals. Look at those light green crystal spheres sailing along with slow revolving motion, like planets revolving through space, except that their orbits are more eccentric. Each of these spheres is a Volvox globator. Under the microscope it looks like a crystalline sphere, studded with bright green specs, from each of which arise two cilia (hairs), serving as oars to row the animal through the water. The specs are united by a
- ↑ Compare Gegenbaur: Grundzüge der vergleichende Anatomie, 1859, pp. 229 und 269; also Leydig über Hydatina senta, in Müller's Archiv, 1857, p. 411.
