Page:BirdWatcherShetlands.djvu/309

Rh which we call, together, spirituality—is quite another. It offends our human pride to think that animals should woo and marry very much as we—when the better part of our nature is not in a strait-jacket—do ourselves. Therefore, there must be no preferences, no love-matches here, all must be in obedience to a blind sexual instinct—something very animal—about which we, of course, with our rings and our ceremonies, our novels, sonnets, spiritual affinities, and prudential considerations, know nothing. Unlike ourselves, the female brute must be ready to mate with any male brute that chance may throw in her way, and if it throw several, she must be absolutely impartial between them, there being neither looks, soul, nor money for her to found a choice on. Therefore she will go to the strongest, and ask no better, for love she knows not, nor can parental authority and filial obedience combine here to give the preference to riches or title, coupled with age or disease. Only by her complete passivity could the female brute be properly differentiated from the human female, and this she must be, or man (the worst brute that the world has yet seen or is ever likely to see) would lose his pre-eminence.

But do no difficulties attend this theory of entire impartiality on the part of the hen bird (for we will keep now to birds) in respect to the cock, during the pairing season? That she is sexually excited by him—as a male, at least, if not as an individual male—we would surely have to conclude, even in the absence