“It has been shown that the courtship of the octopus (O.
vulgaris) is conducted with the utmost propriety and delicacy, and not
brutally, as had been the common supposition. The male gently stretches
out his third arm on the right, caressing the female with its
extremity, and finally passing it into the chamber formed by the
mantle. There is a quick, spasmodic contraction of the female, but she
does not attempt to escape; and if “ the poor beetle that we tread
upon, in corporal sufferance, finds a pang as great as when a giant
dies,” who shall say that the sexual delight is not equally intense
among these diminutive sensualists, and that the hour, sometimes employed
in the sexual act may not be, in some sort, a nearly eternal paradise
to these tiny existences?”J. Richardson Parke HUMAN SEXUALITY (1908)
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