is not generally or often at the present day the choice between finding new
fields of labour, or death; but one far more serious in its ultimate
reaction on humanity as a whole--it is the choice between finding new forms
of labour or sinking slowly into a condition of more or less complete and
passive sex-parasitism! (It is not without profound interest to note the
varying phenomena of sex-parasitism as they present themselves in the
animal world, both in the male and in the female form. Though among the
greater number of species in the animal world the female form is larger and
more powerful rather than the male (e.g., among birds of prey, such as
eagles, falcons, vultures, &c., and among fishes, insects, &c.), yet sex-
parasitism appears among both sex forms. In certain sea-creatures, for
example, the female carries about in the folds of her covering three or
four minute and quite inactive males, who are entirely passive and
dependent upon her. Among termites, on the other hand, the female has so
far degenerated that she has entirely lost the power of locomotion; she can
no longer provide herself or her offspring with nourishment, or defend or
even clean herself; she has become a mere passive, distended bag of eggs,
without intelligence or activity, she and her offspring existing through
the exertions of the workers of the community. Among other insects, such,
for example, as certain ticks, another form of female parasitism prevails,
and while the male remains a complex, highly active, and winded creature,
the female, fastening herself by the head into the flesh of some living
animal and sucking its blood, has lost wings and all activity, and power of
locomotion; having become a mere distended bladder, which when filled with
eggs bursts and ends a parasitic existence which has hardly been life. It
is not impossible, and it appears, indeed, highly probable, that it has
been this degeneration and parasitism on the part of the female which has
set its limitation to the evolution of ants, creatures which, having
reached a point of mental development in some respects almost as high as
that of man, have yet become curiously and immovably arrested. The whole