“How did you want to experiment?”
“I wanted to find out how much sperm wastage there was in a single ejaculation.”
“I’m not with you. What d’you mean by sperm wastage?”
“The average ejaculation from a large animal such as a bull or a horse produces five cc’s of semen. Each cc contains one thousand million separate spermatozoa. This means five thousand million sperm all together.”
“Not five thousand million! Not in one go!”
“That’s what I said.”
“It’s unbelievable.”
“It’s true.”
“How much does a human produce?”
“About half that. About two cc’s and two thousand million.”
“You mean to tell me,” I said, “that every time I pleasure a young lady, I shoot into her two thousand million spermatozoa?”
“Absolutely.”
“All squiggling and squirming and thrashing about?”
“Of course.”
“No wonder it gives her a charge,” I said.
A. R. Woresley was not interested in that aspect. “The point is this,” he said. “A bull, for example, definitely does not need five thousand million spermatozoa in order to achieve fertilization with a cow. Ultimately, he needs only a single sperm. But in order to make sure of hitting the target, he has to use a few million at least. But how many million? That was my next question.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because, my dear fellow, I wanted to find out just how many females, whether they were cows, mares, humans, or whatever, could ultimately be fertilized by a single ejaculation. I was assuming, of course, that all those millions of sperm could be divided up and shared among them. Do you see what I’m driving at?”
“Perfectly. What animals did you use for these experiments?”
“Bulls and cows,” A. R. Woresley said. “I have a brother who owns a small dairy farm over at Steeple Bumpstead not far from here. He had a bull and about eighty cows. We had always been good friends, my brother and I. So I confided in him, and he agreed to let me use his animals. After all, I wasn’t going to hurt them. I might even do him a favour.”
“How could you do him a favour?”
“My brother has never been well off. His own bull, the only one he could afford, was of moderate quality. He would dearly love to have had his whole herd of cows bear calves by a splendid prize bull from very high milkyielding stock.”
“You mean someone else’s bull?”
“Yes, I do.”
“How would you go about obtaining semen from someone else’s valuable bull?”
“I would steal it.”
“Ah-ha.”
“I would steal one ejaculation, and then, provided of course that I was successful with my experiments, I would share out that single ejaculation, those five thousand million sperm, among all of my brother’s eighty cows.”
“How would you share it out?” I asked.
“By what I call hypodermic insemination. By injecting the sperm into the cow with a syringe.”
“I suppose that’s possible.”
“Of course it’s possible,” he said. “After all, the male sexual organ is itself really nothing more than a syringe for injecting semen.”
“Steady on,” I said. “Mine’s a bit more than that.”
“I don’t doubt it, Cornelius, I don’t doubt it,” he answered dryly. “But shall we stick to the point?”
“Sorry.”
“So I started experimenting with bulls’ semen.”
I picked up the bottle of port and refilled his glass. I had the feeling now that old Woresley was onto something pretty interesting and I wanted to keep him going.
“I’ve told you,” he said, “that the average bull produces about five cc’s of fluid each time. That’s not much. Even when mixed with glycerol there wouldn’t be enough there for me to start dividing it up into a great many parts and then expect to be able to inject each of those tiny parts into separate cows. So I had to find a dilutant, something to increase the volume.”
“Why not add more glycerol?”
“I tried it. It didn’t work. Altogether too viscous. I won’t bore you with a list of all the curious substances I experimented with. I will simply tell you the one that works. Skimmed milk works. Eighty per cent skimmed milk, ten per cent egg yolk, and ten per cent glycerol. That’s the magic mixture. The sperm love it. You simply mix the whole cocktail thoroughly, and that, as you can see, gave me a practical volume of fluid to experiment with. So for several years, I worked with my brother’s cows, and finally I arrived at the optimum dose.”