One of the favourite occupations of the human mind is to speculate how the world and mankind will look in the distant future, what technological miracles will have been accomplished, what social problems solved, and what progress made by science and social organisation, and so on. Most of these Utopias, however, do not omit to exhibit a very lively interest in the question of what will be the future, in that better, more advanced or at least technologically more perfect world, of an institution as ancient yet ever popular as sex, propagation, love, marriage, the family, women’s rights, and suchlike. Reference may be made on this point to the relevant literature, such as Paul Adam, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and many others.
By referring to the above examples, the author considers it his duty - now that he has cast a glance into the future of our globe - to discuss also the lines on which sexual matters will be arranged in that future world of the Newts. He is doing so now in order not to have to revert to the subject later on. Admittedly, the sex life of Andrias Scheuchzeri accords, in basic outline, with the propagation of other caudate amphibians: there is no copulation in the strict sense, the female lays her eggs in several stages, the fertilised eggs develop in the water into tadpoles, and so on; details may be found in any book on natural history. We shall therefore mention only a few peculiarities observed in that respect in Andrias Scheuchzeri.
In early April, H. Bolte records, the males associate with the females; in each sexual period the male as a rule sticks to the same female and, for a number of days, does not leave it even for a moment. During that time he takes in no food, whereas the female exhibits considerable voracity. The male pursues her in the water, trying to get his head close to hers. When he has succeeded in this he shoves his mouth a little way in front of her snout, possibly to prevent her from escaping, and becomes motionless. Thus, touching only with their heads while their bodies form an angle of about thirty degrees, the two animals float alongside each other without any movement. From time to time the male begins to writhe so violently that his flank strikes that of the female; thereupon he again becomes motionless, his legs wide apart, with only his mouth touching the head of his chosen mate who, meanwhile, with complete indifference, feeds on whatever she encounters. This, if we may so call it, kiss continues for several days; sometimes the female will tear herself away in her search for food, and the male will then pursue her in evident agitation and even anger. At last the female ceases any further resistance, she no longer tries to escape, and the pair float motionless in the water, like two dark logs lashed together. At that point the male’s body is shaken by convulsive tremors, in the course of which he emits a copious, somewhat sticky sperm into the water. Immediately afterwards he leaves the female and hides away among the rocks, utterly exhausted; in that state his leg or tail might be cut off without defensive reaction on his part.
The female, meanwhile, remains for some time in her rigid, motionless position; then she arches her body vigorously and begins to expel from her cloaca concatenated eggs in a gelatinous sheath; in this she often assists herself with her hindlegs, in the manner of toads. These eggs number from forty to fifty and hang from the female like a tuft. With these eggs the female swims to sheltered spots and there attaches them to algae, seaweed or just stones. Ten days later the same female lays another set of eggs, numbering from twenty to thirty, although she has not been in contact with the male during that period; evidently these eggs were fertilised directly in her cloaca. As a rule a third and a fourth batch of eggs are laid after a further seven or eight days and fifteen to twenty days respectively; these range from fifteen to twenty in number. Within a period from one to three weeks agile tadpoles hatch out, with finely branched gills. After a year these tadpoles grow into adult Newts and are capable of further propagation.
Miss Blanche Kistemaeckers, on the other hand, observed two females and one male Andrias Scheuchzeri in captivity. At mating time the male associated with only one of the females, pursuing her fairly brutally; whenever she eluded him he struck her viciously with his tail. He did not like to see her feed and tried to push her away from her food; it was obvious that he wanted to have her only for himself, and downright terrorised her. When he had emitted his semen he threw himself on the other female and tried to devour her; he had to be removed from his tank and accommodated elsewhere. Nevertheless, that second female also laid fertilised eggs, amounting to a total of sixty-three. However, Miss Kistemaeckers observed that in all three animals the rims of their cloacae were considerably swollen at that time. It would seem therefore, Miss Kistemaeckers writes, that in the case of Andrias fertilisation is accomplished neither by copulation nor externally, but by means of something that might be termed the sexual milieu. As has been seen, fertilisation of the eggs does not require even temporary association. This led the investigator to further interesting experiments. She separated the two sexes; when the appropriate moment arrived she squeezed out the sperm from the male and placed it in the water with the females. Thereupon the females began to lay fertilised eggs. In a further experiment Miss Blanche Kistemaeckers filtered the male’s semen and introduced the filtrate from which the spermatozoa had been removed (a clear slightly acid fluid) into the water with the females; even then the females began to lay eggs, about fifty in number, of which the majority were fertilised and yielded normal tadpoles. This led Miss Kistemaeckers to the important concept of the sexual milieu, which represents a separate intermediate stage between parthenogenesis and sexual reproduction. Fertilisation of the eggs takes place simply through a chemical change of the environment (a certain increase in acidity which it has not so far been possible to bring about artificially), a change which seems to be connected somehow with the sexual function of the male. But evidently that function is not itself necessary; the fact that the male associates with the female appears to be a survival of an earlier developmental stage, when fertilisation in the case of Andrias took place in the same way as in other Newts. That association, as Miss Kistemaeckers rightly points out, is some kind of inherited illusion of paternity; in fact the male is not the father of the tadpoles but merely a certain - essentially impersonal - chemical factor of the sexual milieu which is the real fertilising agent. If we kept a hundred associated pairs of Andrias Scheuchzeri in one tank we might assume that a hundred individual fertilisation acts are taking place; in actual fact this is one single act, namely the collective sexualisation of the given environment, or, to put it more precisely, a certain increase in the acidity of the water, to which the ripe eggs of Andrias automatically react by developing into tadpoles. Produce that unknown acidity factor artificially, and no males will be necessary. Thus the sex life of the remarkable Andrias is revealed as a Grand Illusion; his erotic passion, his marriage and sexual tyranny, his temporary fidelity, his ponderous and slow ecstasy - all these are really unnecessary, outdated, almost symbolical actions accompanying or, in a manner of speaking, adorning the male’s true impersonal sexual act which is the creation of the sexual milieu permitting fertilisation. The females’ strange apathy with which they react to that pointless frantic personal courtship of the males clearly suggests that in the males’ wooing the females instinctively see a purely formal ceremony or a prelude to their own mating act, in which they coalesce sexually with the fertilising environment; we might say that the Andrias female has a clearer idea of the state of affairs and a more down-to-earth approach to it, free from erotic illusions.
(Miss Kistemaeckers’ experiments were supplemented by interesting experiments by the learned Abbé Bontempelli. He dried and ground up the sperm of Andrias and introduced the material into water containing females; in this case, too, the females began to lay fertile eggs. The same result was obtained when he dried and ground up the sex organs of Andrias or when he extracted them with alcohol or boiled them and poured the extract into the females’ tank. He obtained the same result when he repeated the experiment with extracts of the cerebral hypophysis and even with extracts of the epidermal glands of Andrias, expressed when the animal was in heat. In all these instances the females initially failed to react to these additions; only after a little while did they cease to catch food and became motionless, and indeed rigid, in the water, whereupon, a few hours later, they began to eject gelatinous eggs roughly the size of broad beans.)
Mention should be made in this context of the strange ritual called the salamander dance. (We do not mean the Salamander Dance which became the rage at that time especially in the best society and which Bishop Hiram declared to be ‘the most obscene dance he had ever heard of’.) What happened was that at the full moon (outside the breeding season) the Andriases would come up the beach in the evenings, but only the male ones, sit down in a circle and start twisting their upper bodies with a strange undulating movement. This was a movement typical of these giant newts even under different circumstances, but during their ‘dances’ they abandoned themselves to it frenetically, passionately, to the point of exhaustion, like dancing dervishes. Some scientists regarded this mad writhing and shuffling as a cult of the moon and hence as a religious ceremony; others, by contrast, saw this dance as essentially erotic and explained it by just that strange sexual pattern we have described. We have said that in the case of Andrias Scheuchzeri the real fertilising agent is the so-called sexual milieu as a collective and impersonal mediator between individual males and females. We have also said that the females accept this impersonal relationship in a far more realistic and matter-of-fact manner than the males, who - apparently from an instinctive male vanity and aggressiveness - wish to maintain at least the appearance of sexual conquest and therefore play-act amorous wooing and conjugal ownership. This is one of the great erotic illusions and it is compensated for, in a most interesting manner, by just these great male festivities, which are thus said to be nothing other than an instinctive attempt to perceive oneself as a Collective Male. That mass dance, it is argued, overcomes that atavistic and senseless illusion of male sexual individualism; that twisting, intoxicated, frenzied mass is nothing other than the Collective Male, the Collective Sex Partner and the Great Copulator, performing his famous nuptial dance and surrendering himself to a huge wedding ritual - with the curious exclusion of the females who are meanwhile smacking their lips over some small fish or squid they have just consumed. The well-known Charles J. Powell, who has called this Newt ritual the Dance of the Male Principle, further observes: ‘And are these collective Newt rituals not the very root and mainspring of that strange Newt collectivism? Let us remember that real animal communities are found only where the life and development of a species is not based on the sexual pair: with bees, ants and termites. The community of the bees might be expressed as: I, the Maternal Hive. The community of the Newts can be expressed quite differently: We, the Male Principle. Only all males jointly, when at the given moment they almost exude from themselves their fertile sexual milieu, become that Great Male that penetrates into the womb of the females and copiously multiplies life. Their paternity is collective; that is why their whole nature is collective and finds expression in collective activity, while the females, having performed their egg-laying, lead a more or less dispersed and solitary life until the next spring. The males alone are the community. The males alone perform collective tasks. In no other animal species does the female play such a subordinate part as in Andrias; the females are excluded from collective action and in point of fact do not display the least interest in it. Their moment comes when the Male Principle saturates their environment with an acidity that is chemically barely perceptible but biologically so pervasive that it is effective even in the infinite dilution produced by the ocean tides. It is as if the Ocean itself became a male, fertilising millions of ova on its shores.’
‘In spite of all the cockerel’s pride,’ Charles J. Powell continues, ‘nature has, in the majority of animal species, tended to endow the female with vital superiority. The male exists for his own pleasure and in order to kill; he is a conceited and puffed-up individual, whereas the female represents the species in all its vigour and established virtues. In the case of Andrias (and partly also in Man) the relationship is substantially different; through the establishment of male collectivity and solidarity the male clearly acquires a biological superiority and determines the development of the species to a far greater extent than the female. Perhaps it is just this significant male trend in his evolution that makes Andrias display such engineering talent, i.e. a typically male talent. Andrias is a born technician with an inclination towards large-scale undertakings; these secondary sexual characteristics of the male, i.e. technical talent and a gift for organisation, are developing in him before our very eyes, and with such rapidity and success that we would regard it as a miracle of nature if we did not know that the most powerful vital agents are just these sexual determinants. Andrias Scheuchzer is an animal faber and in technical achievement it may well surpass even Man in the foreseeable future - and that only as a result of the natural circumstances that he has created a purely male community.’