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LIFE AND LOVE

Bo fliss {Hlorlev.

A SONG OF LIFE. 12mo. #1.25,
LIFE AND LOVE. 12mo. = $1.25.
THE BEE PEOPLE. 12mo. $1.25.

A.C. MCCLURG AND CO.
Chicago.

LIFE AND LOVE

BY

MARGARET WARNER MORLEY

AUTHOR OF “A SONG OF LIFE,” ETC.

Lllustrated by the Author

CHICAGO
A. C. MCCLURG AND COMPANY

1899

CopyRIGHT,
By A. C. McCiurc & Co.

A.D. 1895.

CONTENTS:

CHAPTER
I. INrRoDUCTION .

II. First PARENTS.

III. SprroGyRa eo %

1V. THE DIvIsion oF LABOR

V. FisH LIFE

VI. CRUSTACEANS . . . 1. ew
VII. MerramorruHosis oF INSECTS. .
VIII. Repropucrion oF INsEcrs . . .-

IX. FLowers Anp INSECTS:

X. PLanr LIFE .

XI. Birp LIFE
XII. Skin CHANGES .
XIII. Pertopic Activity
XIV. THE MAMMAL .

XV. VARIABILITY AND INHERITANCE
XVI. NurriITION AND REPRODUCTION
XVII. VALUE OF SEXUAL REPRODUCTION

XVIII. INDIVIDUALITY .

XIX. MALE AND FEMALE .

XX. Maturity

XXI. Human LIFE
XXII. MAN AND THE COMMUNITY
MAITE CONCLUSION « «+ «© « » # # @ *

LIFE AND LOVE.

i
INTRODUCTION.

N all ages of the world, among all peoples, the
same question, What is life? has been asked,
and has never been answered. To-day we are all
eagerly asking it. The great men of science
accumulate observations about it, but cannot
satisfy us. The poet and the philosopher give us
the inspiring and consoling reply that life, some-
way, is a part of a Divine Life, manifested. But
aside from this thought of the poet, we seem to
ourselves to come nearest to some understanding of
this mystery when we speak the great companion,
word “ love,” — love, the great continuer of life.
It is in itself a mystery nearly as deep as the
mystery of life; its high office is that of drawing
together, uniting, perfecting, renewing, — the same
power working in the single cell, in the complex
structure, and — with what a sublime difference —
in the human being!

8 Life and Love.

Human love has been the poetic theme of man
from the beginning, the one imperishable theme,
the theme appealing most powerfully to the imagi-
nation and the heart, promising solution to the
hard problems of life, and offering consolation and
satisfaction to the yearning soul.

Man is ever looking towards the ideal love to
lift and save him; the universal reproductive
instinct seems to him to promise continuance and
progress to his spirit as well as to his body.

The primitive form of love, the root from
which all love has grown, is the reproductive
instinct, the instinct that attracts one sex to the
other for the purpose of re-creation.

From this germinal love has grown and blossomed
that altruistic love which finally distinguishes man
from all other earthly life.

The understanding of human love in all its man-
ifestations, physical and spiritual, is necessary to
the well-being of the world.

To understand the universality of the reproduc-
tive instinct in all the life of the earth, to under-
stand the meaning and power of the sex-instinct,
the grandeur of the sex-idea, and the immense
beauty of its manifestations, —is necessary to the
understanding of human love, and is the imme-
diate duty of our day.

To understand love in all its aspects, to know
it in its beauty, its greatness, and its power, and
to free it from all ideas of grossness and evil is

Lnutroduction. 9

the instant duty, as it is the best hope of our
race.

Consciously to relate love to the great cosmic
forces which we see everywhere operating through-
out nature, to withdraw it from the realm of shame
and superstition it has so long inhabited, to depose
the sensual usurper which has been worshipped
in the name of love, and to set Love herself upon
the throne, fair, luminous, and pure to save and
bless, is the effort of multitudes of minds in the
present day.

The following pages are not an attempt to add
to the wealth of discovery made by science in the
present remarkable era; they are intended solely
to place within reach of the ordinary reader truths
as arule so encased in technical phraseology that
many people, desirous of knowing the mysteries
of the living being, so far as these have been
revealed by modern research, cannot get at the
facts because of lack of time or inclination to
become familiar with the technical forms of
expression,

The last fifty years have been unexampled in
the world’s history in the discovery of facts con-
cerning the physical life. These facts concern
every one, and besides being of unparalleled inter-
est in themselves, they have a direct bearing upon
the guidance of individual life.

Much in the life of the individual that seems
isolated, chaotic, and incomprehensible, becomes

10 Life and Love.

intelligible when viewed in the light of the facts
of universal life.

In regard to sex-life there often reigns the
wildest confusion of thought, and it is in the hope
of helping to place in an orderly, harmonious, and
worthy position the most important fact of our
physical existence that this little book is offered
to the public.

first Parents. II

II.
: FIRST PARENTS.

HE living being is constantly changing;
unlike the crystal, which, once formed,

remains fixed, it continues to
change as long as it continues to iw
exist. It has the motion of life, ear
is always wasting, always needing
renewal; and this whether it be of
microscopic or colossal size. For
its renewal it constantly demands
food, and whether it be animal or
plant, lives only upon condition
that it have its proper supply.

The first, the strongest, the most
urgent cry of life is the cry for
food.

The second great necessity of
life is reproduction. Be it never
so well nourished and carefully
guarded, the individual must sooner or later wane;
it loses its initial vitality, and, making a supreme
effort towards continued existence, provides for

12 Life and Love.

future generations. Otherwise its race would
become extinct.

Just as food is the first great need of the individ-
ual, so is reproduction the first great need of the
race. By this mysterious power the places of
those who die are filled by others, and the cycle
of life is eternally renewed.

From earliest ages to the present day, the mystery
of reproduction has held an all-important place
in the mind and heart of man. Among the ancients
it has been the subject of most sublime religious
expressions, and rightly understood, is one of the
most beautiful, most wonderful, most sacred of
truths.

This renewal, this creation of new beings out
of the elements of those that exist, is intimately
connected with the mystery of life itself.

Irom the lowest to the highest, all forms of life
possess the power of reproduction.

And what is this mysterious power which awed
and puzzled the ancient world as it awes and
puzzles us of to-day?

It is the gift of life which the parent makes to
the child, the division of the parent, which, no
longer able to continue its solitary existence, at a
given right time shares its life with another, that
other its offspring.

Life in its beginnings is in outer appearance
all alike and seems very simple. Some forms of
life are content to abide always in the beginning ;

First Parents. 13

other forms mount to higher and more complex
existence; but all start alike as a single cell of
something we call protoplasm.

Protoplasm is a marvellous thing —is in fact
the marvellous thing.

In appearance it is a colorless, transparent, jelly-
like substance, concerning whose existence and im-
portance the world was long in ignorance, because
of its insignificant appearance, and because of the
way in which it was surrounded and concealed by
all sorts of substances which it had itself created.
But now it is known that protoplasm is not only
a living substance, but that it is the only living
substance. Every animal and plant owes its exist-
ence to the protoplasm it contains.

This is incomprehensible until one understands
something of the structure of living things, — and
not until the microscope had been invented
and had lent its aid to the eye of man to see
objects otherwise invisible to him, did he sus-
pect the truth concerning the protoplasm.

Now one can place beneath the lens of the
microscope any living tissue and find it made
up of many little chambers, or cells, as they
are called. Within these chambers, or cells,
in the living tissue is always found the trans- {L
parent, jelly-like protoplasm; a tiny piece of |, ve
the inside skin of the onion, for instance, P¥t9
shows very beautifully the cells containing pro-
toplasm of which it is made.

14 Life and Love.

These cells are cylindrical in shape and lie side
by side, each with a spot of condensed protoplasm
called a nucleus, and around the nucleus and
touching the surrounding cell wall is the trans-
parent protoplasm, looking like the white of egg.
The walls of these cells are tough and strong and
are made by the protoplasm within.

The cell walls are not alive, any more than an
egg-shell is alive. Only the protoplasm is alive.

The skin of the onion is made up of millions of
these little cells lying side by side, and if we
examine the other parts of the onion we find them
each made up of cells lying close together, the
only difference being that the cells assume differ-
ent shapes in different tissues. But all are essen-
tially alike, living protoplasm within, surrounded
by a protecting wall.

If, instead of the onion, we were to examine a
bit of muscle under the microscope we should find
that too made up of cells lying close together. A
carefully prepared section of bone would also show
us the cell with its protoplasm within, but this
time surrounded by a strong fortification of lime.
The lime, which forms the hard part of the bone,
is not alive, only the tiny drop of protoplasm within
the lime fortress is living. This protoplasm has
the power to extract the lime from the blood which
flows about it and build the bony framework, and
this framework as seen under the microscope is
almost as beautiful as a snow-flake, with its spicules
of lime raying out from the centre.

first Parents. 15

Thus each tissue in living things is built up of
numberless cells of protoplasm, and in each tissue
the cells have a characteristic shape, some of which
are portrayed at the bottom of the page.

Sometimes, however, protoplasm exists without
any definite form, and has thus been found, a mere
layer of slime, at the bottom of the sea.

Again, a cell of protoplasm may exist by itself,
not united with other cells to forma tissue. Where
it thus exists it sometimes has no cell-wall, is but
aspeck of protoplasm, living its little life in the
water, often too tiny to be visible to the naked eye.
Yet this little single cell of protoplasm is as truly
a living creature as is a kitten or a bird. For
some reason in the one case, countless numbers
of cells congregated together and built up a kitten
or a bird; while in the other case, there was no
such building up; the single cell was destined to
live alone.

It takes many tissues and countless millions of
cells to form the organs of the kitten or the bird
and enable all their various functions to be per-
formed. Then how does the creature
possessing but one cell survive? For we
know that every living thing must i

acd f va4
We ey i
at ol. © D3
Sear oe
\

ve,

16 Life and Love.

have food and must take the oxygen from the
air and must perform a number of operations
within its body.

Imagine a creature composed of but a single cell!

This little being appears to us at first thought
very simple; yet when we consider what it
accomplishes we are filled with admiration and
wonder.

In the first place it must have food or it cannot
live; how is it to obtain this food?

The protoplasm of which it consists readily
soives the problem; it recognizes its nutriment in
the water which flows about it, and exerts an attrac-
tive power upon each tiny particle of food, causing
it to become a part of the hungry cell. Having
drawn food into itself, the protoplasm proceeds
to extract from it just what it needs to satisfy its
hunger, and discards the waste parts; for it must
be understood that hunger does not depend upon
sis¢e, but upon the necessity of the living material
in the body to be renewed. A bit of protoplasm
so small that it would take a powerful microscope
to enable it to be seen at all, has the same need
for food that the largest animal has, and if deprived
of it would die of starvation.

Besides appropriating its microscopic meal, our
tiny cell of protoplasm changes or “digests” the
food into a material like itself, and builds this new
material into its substance to take the place of the
used up particles,

first Parents. 17

Some of these single-celled creatures do not
even wait for their food to come to them, but
themselves go in search of it.

How can this be when they have no legs, no
organs of locomotion whatever?

But again the protoplasm is equal to the situ-
ation; desiring to move, it will not be deterred
by lack of organs, for this remarkable substance
has the power of “contractility” as it is called,
the peculiar power that muscle possesses, — its
power of moving. The protoplasm of the cell
that is to move thrusts out a part of itself, a little
advance guard of protoplasm, to which the re-
mainder of the creature is then drawn.

So we now see that protoplasm can act where
it is, and that it can move to another place. We
see that it can digest, or change crude food into
body material for its own use. But more than
this, it is also sensitive, that is, has within itself
something which in higher life develops into nerve
matter. Lastly, it has the power of reproduction,
which is all important to the continuance of its
species on the earth.

Thus the tiny cell has within its protoplasm all
the conditions of life and growth and continuance.

There is a little living being, well known to
science, composed of but a single cell; whether
it is a plant or an animal, who shall say? We call
it amceba. It belongs to those lowest forms of
life called protozoa, and like all living things has

2

18 Life and Love.

the desire for food, which its protoplasm first ap-
propriates, then converts into available material.
At a certain period in its existence the amceba
obeys the universal law of life, and in place of one
amoeba, we have two.

The Future, appealing to the amceba, causes it
to multiply its form; and this it does in the
simplest way, by merely dividing in the middle
and becoming two.

This is the earliest form of parentage, the
simplest form of reproduction. This separation

of one into more than one is a primal impulse
g of living things.
2 Yielding to this necessity the amceba lives
. on forever, or as Jong as the earth continues
‘to support life.

Pe It becomes immortal in the scientific sense
in which the term is used to denote a con-
tinuance of the physical life on earth.

Only it, however, and its nearest relatives, as
simple in structure as itself, achieve the stupendous
result of personal physical immortality.

The amceba, by dividing its whole substance,
knows no loss, no death of any part; only violence
can sunder it from life.

It resolves itsclf into its own offspring, and
nothing perishes.

But this mere dividing of the individual is not
always enough, even for the lowly protozoa; forms
almost as simple as the amceba seek to renew the

First Parents. 19

vitality of the race by a stronger impulse of life
than the individual alone possesses.

So we are told there are times when one single-
celled creature finds itself irresistibly drawn to
another.

Its lagging forces are powerfully wakened as it
feels the touch of this kindred life, and these two
flow together in indissoluble union, as two drops
of water might flow into one, and from this union
results a stronger and more vital race.

Aroused to momentary intense activity by this
new contact, peace follows the joining of the two
lives, and as though to express the joy life holds
even to so lowly a creature, the new being
composed of two united into one resolves itself
into many offspring, thus handing on a more
vigorous inheritance to its descendants.

There are many forms of these single-celled
creatures, but in all, the story of regeneration is
essentially the same.

Some seem never to reproduce themselves with-
out the inspiration of contact with another of their
kind.

Some give forth life for a few generations by
simply dividing, but ultimately require the renewal
that comes from union with another, or their vital
power ceases, and death ensues.

It would seem that this expression of what we
may in anticipation call love, this attraction to
another and fusion with it, is necessary to the con-
tinued existence of even the humble protozoa.

20 Life and Love.

“Even at this low level,” says one inspired
scientist, “only through the fire of love can the
phoenix of the species renew its youth.”

Love preserves the universe of life, and to many
the thought has come, May not love be but
another manifestation of the same infinite power
which preserves the earth itself in its place, and
all the members of the starry host in their places?

For this is the nature of love,—to draw to
itself the beloved object.

To the finite mind it may seem a long way from
the amceba to the stars; but to the infinite mind,
it may well be but a single step.

Spirogyra. 21

IIT.

SPIROGYRA.

IFE animates the world of plants as it does
that of animals. Low down there is no
observable distinction; one cannot tell
whether certain simple creatures are
plants or animals. And in the begin-
ning there probably was no division of
the kind.

Far, far back, as every one knows,
there was probably no physical life at all
on the earth. In time the surface of the
earth assumed a form favorable to the
existence of the new activity — life.
And then life appeared, but not the
life that we know; it took countless ages for that
to emerge from its simple protoplasmic beginning.

What the very first forms of life were, we cannot
know; we only know that they must have been
very simple; perhaps the beginning was but the
formation of a layer of protoplasm with no definite
form, such as is yet found in the ocean in some
places. Then there may have come into being
the single-celled organisms, then the creatures

22 Life and Love.

made of simple colonies of cells, then the more
complex cell-colonies, until finally man himself
appeared, the crown to this marvellous expression
of divine power which we call life.

As the earth was fitted to receive it, there doubt-
less came into being each higher form. So the
low forms of animal life are in all probability rep-
resentatives of the earlier forms, and by tracing
the development of life from below up, one acquires
not only knowledge concerning the structure of
individuals, but also concerning the history of the
advent of life.

It is probable that plants and animals both came
from the same form of simple protoplasm, and
were brought into being by the power that makes
growth possible, — the same forces acting in both,
though expressing themselves differently.

Plants, being able to obtain nutriment directly
from the mineral world, probably first assumed
definite form, while the animal, dependent upon
the vegetable for existence, we believe to have
come later.

In plants and animals alike, love as well as life
informs and makes beautiful the most lowly of
objects.

The green scum of ponds may not seem an
attractive subject, yet what is more charming to
the eye than the delicate threads which form it,
when they are seen under the microscope?

Even without the aid of the microscope this

Spirogyra. 23

scum is not to be wholly despised; run your
fingers through the water where it floats and you
find clinging to them innumerable long, green
threads, like the hair of some strange water-maiden.
Now put one of these tresses under the lens.

You will find, probably, that you have captured
one of the numerous forms of spirogyra, and that
these long green hairs lie side by side, parallel to
each other, and untangled.

Each filament is composed of long tube-like
cells placed end to end; and running in spirals
of beautiful form about these cells are bright-green
lines, —the chlorophyll, or plant color, which,
without the revealing help of the microscope, we
see in mass and so rudely that the filaments appear
to the naked eye lines of unbroken green.

Lying in the water this simple plant, with no
roots, no leaves, takes to itself the nutriment it
needs. The protoplasm which forms the internal
living part of each long cell absorbs and digests,
just as protoplasm everywhere does.

Spirogyra, too, reproduces itself, else whence
would arise the bright-green felt-work that covers
the ponds so soon?

Life must be sweet even to it, and it will not
die. Do not think reproduction in this green
scum is a simple matter, for what life zs simple?
What living thing ignoble?

All the mysterious forces of life dwell in our
humble spirogyra, and that attraction, which in

24 Life and Love.

higher life develops into love, is necessary to its
perpetuation.

From a tiny spore these green filaments have
formed, quickly absorbing light and heat, and in
a short time reaching prodigious growth; then
comes a time when the future urgently appeals to
them; each cell feels a strange, irresistible attrac-
tion to its neighbor cell, and the filaments lying
side by side are drawn together by this new mag-
netism, this incipient love force, irresistibly com-
pelling two to become one. Quietly they have
hitherto rested, but now something in each cell
wakens; no longer is it content to be alone.
The protoplasm in each cell yielding to
this new impulse, collects together, concen-

trating itself into one compact mass.

ae And now notice how the cell-walls,
feeling the desire of the liv-

4 ing protoplasm
: within, reach
gut te each
{tj other! At last

'
t
n iit @ e a %«

they meet; they unite; all obstruction having given
way, the protoplasm from one cell flows into that
of the other, the two thus becoming one. Con-
centrated into one compact spore they are saved
from death, they go on in life.

Spirogyra. 25

The cell-walls, now lifeless, useless, perish.
Those vital spheres, each formed of the united
protoplasm of two cells, fall to the bottom of the
pond. They fear neither cold nor drought. The
pond may dry up, the ice may form about them;
love has triumphed; through it their continued
existence is assured.

At the coming of the spring rain, the warming
of the spring sun, the new life unfolds; from the
germ of the spirogyra that was, there springs to life
a new filament with its beautiful emerald bands,
and again the green scum is seen over the pond.

The world is full of invisible as well as visible
forms of life, thus living and reproducing. They
float in the air, are found in the water. Micro-
scopic creatures of simple structure and beautiful
and rare forms live their little cycle of life, meet,
unite, are physically immorta! through the life they
hand on to future generations.

26 Life and Love.

IV.
THE DIVISION OF LABOR.

HEN the amceba and certain other one-
celled forms of life reproduce by simple

division, we see the whole substance of

the creature resolving into its offspring.

When the amceba becomes two, which
of the two is parent, which is offspring?
We cannot tell. In size they are the
same, in structure the same, there is no
childhood on the part of one, no paren-
tal care on the part of the other. The
amceba, in multiplying, gives all; its
whole substance is involved in the change.

So when, to further the ends of
reproduction, two single-celled be-
ings unite, which is father, which
mother? Again the question can-
not be answered.

Both parents are alike, except
fin this: in some way different
magnetisms appear to animate
them; although seeming to us
alike, they apparently exert upon
F each other the powerful attractive
Kl force of opposite poles of the magnet.

The Division of Lador. 24

Inthe multiplication of the amceba, as has been
noted, there is no death, merely the going on of
the whole mass in different directions.

So in the spirogyra found in the scum of the
ponds, all the protoplasm of one cell passes into
and unites with all the protoplasm of the neighbor-
ing cell; but the result is not quite the same, there
is some waste, some death here; for when this
union has taken place, the cell-walls, no longer
useful, no longer kept intact by the contact of the
flowing protoplasm, disintegrate.

They are empty houses, their tenants forever
departed. True, all that was living in them is still
living; the cell-wall in itself was no more alive
than is the end of one’s finger-nail; the protoplasm
built and nourished it, and when ready, left it.
And yet, when the spore formed there was an end
to the green filament, that form of its existence at
least perished. Only in its sced did it live, and
through that develop into green filaments another
year —not the same filaments, however.

Simplest of all, the amceba reproduced by divi-
sion, without the loss of any part of its substance,
and without undergoing any change of form. Then
we see the spirogyra preserving its whole mass of
living protoplasm, but giving up its green-banded
walls.

This extreme simplicity in multiplying does not
belong to all of even the one-celled organisms, how-
ever, for some devote but a small portion of their

%

28 Life and Love.

substance to the renewal of their race. Instead of
dividing in two, or devoting their whole store of
protoplasm to the production of a germ or spore,
they bud off a small portion, or a number of small
portions from the surface of the body, and each of
these portions in some mysterious way contains all
the possibilities of the parent life, and in time
grows to the likeness of the parent.

By thus budding off but a, small portion of its
substance, the creature retains its own individual-
ity independent of its offspring. But the end
is death, for the parent that is left cannot go on
living forever, as do those parents who actually
become their own offspring.

What is left of the parent after the reproductive
portion has been budded off in time perishes;
only this cast off portion lives to develop in its
turn into the parent form, and repeat the story;
that part which it buds off as offspring, or seed,
living; the remainder dying.

Thus on and on passes the vital reproductive
material, the form of the parent constantly falling
away and perishing, the reproductive material alone
persisting and continuing the race.

The individual body, in the higher life, per-
ishes; the race, through the reproductive material,
continues.

The habit displayed by some of the single-celled
creatures of budding off but a small portion, which
is endowed with power to become a perfect form,

The Division of Labor. 29

suggests the higher forms of life, where the animal
or plant is composed, notof one cell, but of many,

among which is established a division of labor.
When the single-celled organism reproduces, it
divides and becomes two, as seen in the amceba.
Each division is a complete individual. In the
higher forms of life the creature sfarts as a single
cell. Every living thing, even to man himself, sets
out on the life journey, as a single cell. This cell
divides, but instead of the two cells thus made
separating from each other, they stay together.
Each of the two cells then divides again, and the
group of cells, instead of separating, stays together.
The diagram at the bottom of the page may
make clearer how the cell is able to build complex
forms. There is seen the single cell, then the cell
after division, then a simple thimble-like form built
of many cells, then a little ani-
mal that grows in the sea, in
which the cells have assumed
several different

<=> forms, and final-

ly a worm-like form in which the creature is but
along tube, with another tube running through
the middle. This last form has many different sets
of cells doing different work. For, unlike the

30 Life and Love.

single-celled creatures, where all the functions of
life were performed by each cell, these complex
forms give rise to cells which do not perform a//
of the life functions, but only part of them. Thus
in the higher animals and plants certain cells are
set apart to perform certain functions, and these
cells are freed from all other duties.

In our own bodies, for instance, the muscle cells
do all the moving. The bone cells, the nerve cells,
have no power of motion; only as the muscles
move them do they change their place.

The nerve cells, on the other hand, have con-
fided to them the power of sensation and of direct-
ting the motion of the muscles.

So each kind of ccll has its special work, which
it does for the whole community, thus relieving all
other cells ofthe necessity of doing that special work.

This division of labor, however, does not prevent
the relation between the different kinds of cclls
from being very close. On the contrary, the rela-
tionship is so close that if an accident happen to
one cell or one set of cells, all the rest of the body
may suffer because of it.

Where there is this division of labor among the
cells of the body, reproduction cannot involve the
whole creature, as it sometimes does when the
whole creature consists of but one cell.

Consequently all higher forms of life close their
career in death, their physical life continuing only
through their offspring.

The Division of Labor. 31

Only the higher life, emerging from the immortal
single-celled form, is blessed by consciousness and
— death.

Death! how sublime the thought when it is
recognized as the sign of a higher form of life!

The ameeba, unfeeling, unknowing, lives, grows,
divides; goes on endlessly, with no development,
no enlightenment.

In the more complex form something wakes to
consciousness; the creature lives, it grows, it de-
velops, it understands — it dies.

Because it is complex, intelligence dawns.

Because it is complex, it dies. Beautiful death!
—sign of the sublime in life.

The more complex beings, like the simplest
ones, bud off portions of the body for purposes of
reproduction; unlike them, however, the budding
takes place from the inner part of the body instead
of from the surface.

These inner portions so budded off in time may
develop into forms like the parent.

The jelly-fish, which may be seen at any seaside,
is an illustration of this. There is the body-wall;
the cavity within; and from the latter a mass of
reproductive cells budded off. There are several
of these ‘“ buds” in each jelly-fish, and the story of
reproduction told in their development is wonder-
fully interesting and instructive, but unfortunately
it is very complicated; so we will turn from the
pretty transparent forms floating like bulbs of

a2 Life and Love.

crystal in the water to another form of life, much
less beautiful to look at, but extremely interesting
to the student. This is the Ascidian, or Sea
Squirt, so named from its habit of suddenly con-
tracting when handled and treating its tormentor
to an unexpected jet of sea-water.

It is an uncouth creature, oblong and lumpish,
sometimes too small to handle readily; sometimes
a foot or more in length. In early youth moving
freely through the water, as it grows
older it firmly attaches itself to the
rock or something else under water,
and stays there to the end of its days.

Let us look at one of the larger
kinds. We find it has a thick, skin-like
covering with two openings — one at
the top, #; one at the side, a.

The one at + opens into the gill-
chamber, g. ¢, and is the mouth,
through which water passes to the gill-
chamber, then out through the slits of
the gill-chamber into the body-cavity.

At o is the opening from the body-
cavity to the surrounding world of
water. In the body-cavity we see,
besides the gill-chamber, certain other
organs, among them a number of
round bodies, e, which have been bud-
ded off from the inside of the animal’s body.
These are reproductive cells, familiar to us under

The Division of Labor. 43

the name of eggs. But lying close to the egg-
' cells is a gland, s, from which are sent other buds,
much smaller than the eggs. These ripen and fall
with the ripe eggs into the water of the body-
cavity.

When these tiny particles and the eggs are set
free together in the water, they feel the same
attraction toward each other that the two uniting
cells of spirogyra felt, or the two protozoa when
they were so irresistibly drawn to unite with each
other.

The egg-cell of the ascidian has not enough
vitality to develop unaided into an_ ascidian,
neither has this smaller cell. If like the two
protozoa they unite, however, the result can be
achieved. ?

It would seem as though this complex ascidian
could not impress the image of all its parts upon
one set of cells, but that the great labor of pro-
ducing an ascidian must be shared; so it supplies
two sets of cells, which by uniting become able to
reproduce the parent form.

The smaller particles are called sperm-cells and
represent the male element, while the egg-cells
form the female element.

Free to move about in the body-cavity the sperm
and egg cells are attracted to each other; each
egg-cell is penetrated by a sperm-cell, and from this
union develops the young ascidian which appears
at x, wriggling about, unattached and free, in the

3

34 Life and Love.

water of the body-cavity of the parent before it
finally finds its way out at ointothe ocean. There
its free life soon ends, it settles down on a rock and
assumes the monotonous life of an adult ascidian.

The egg, by union with the sperm-cell, has
gained power to develop; it has been ‘ fertilized,”
or rendered able to produce the parent form.

The sperm-cell, too, by union with the egg-cell,
is saved from perishing; it is enabled to express
the characteristics of the creature from which it
was budded in the new creature which springs
from the egg it has fertilized.

In our ascidian, as well as in many other low
forms of life the two kinds of cells are both budded
off by the same individual, which thus contains
both male and female elements. Such a creature,
uniting as it does the t'vo sexes in one, is called a
hermaphrodite. :

In some cases, however, even among low forms
of life, one individual gives rise to but one kind of
reproductive material, another separate individual
supplying the other kind.

The sexes are thus separate, the egg-cells being
produced by the female, the sperm-cells by the
male.

In those low forms of life where the eggs of the
female and the sperm-cells of the male are cast
forth into the water, they float about until they
find each other, or failing in this, die,—a very
wasteful and precarious method of reproduction.

The Division of Labor. 35

The vast amount.of reproductive material pro-
duced and apparently wasted in the lower life is
one of the most striking facts to the student of
nature, and it was long before the significance of
this tremendous over-fertility was understood and
found to play a very important part in the develop-
ment of life.

Oftentimes in the lower though complex forms
of life the parent literally resolves its whole sub-
stance into reproductive material, the maturing of
this material causing the death of the parent; for
instance, in certain very low forms the parent be-
comes a mere shell to hold the progeny, and when
they mature bursts open to free them, and thus
expires. This is the case with the simple Ortho-
nectid which, when mature, is little more than a
cup of eggs. Incertain forms of worms the female
breaks up upon liberating the egg-cells, and even
as high as the insects the parent is in some cases
sacrificed by the development of offspring.

Offspring is in all life but a portion budded off
from the parent; sometimes, as we have seen,
being a large portion, again but a very small one.

In the lower forms of life this budding for pur-
poses of reproduction may take place in almost
any part of the body, but as the creature becomes
more complex, reproduction is restricted to certain
tissues which are set apart to do that work, and are
peculiarly adapted to it.

As we have seen, both male and female give off

36 Life and Love.

certain cells, which, though they may be powerless
in themselves, by union with the cells given off by
the opposite sex, have power to produce offspring
like the parents.

But even in creatures which have achieved con-
siderable complexity of structure, and which repro-
duce normally by the production of egg and sperm
cells there is sometimes a form of reproduction
which recalls the simple method of the amceba. A
certain ringed marine worm, for instance, merely
sprouts, as it were, from the side or the end, and
there is formed
sometimes quite
an intricate net-
work of those
strange crea-
tures.

Another sea-
worm, again, when a certain length has been
reached, develops a head at one joint and a
tail at the preceding onc, and when this devel-
opment is completed the creature is composed
of two perfect worms which fall apart. Sometimes

several of these new
aqat worms are formed

" before separation

takes place, the re-
sult being a chain of forming worms.

In the upper registers of the scale of life this
budding of the parent into offspring which do not

The Division of Labor. 34

have to go through the egg transformations, is
neverseen. The egg, however, in certain low forms,
even as high as insects, has the power sometimes
to develop without the aid of the sperm-cell, — its
store of nutriment and vitality is sufficient to carry
it through the difficult transformation, but the tiny,
innutrient sperm-cell cannot save itself by unaided
development; it must always unite with the egg-cell
if it is to continue its existence,

In all the higher forms of life, however, neither
egg nor sperm cell alone can achieve development ;
yielding to the vital attraction which draws them
together, they unite, and from this inexplicable
union comes power to produce a new and perfect
creature,

38 Life and Love.

V.

FISH LIFE.

N the ascidian and other low forms of life the

eggs and sperm-cclls are dropped into the
water to float about and find
each other as best they may.
The mysterious attraction of one
sex for the other is felt by these
atoms alone. The full-grown par-
cents from which they spring live
in cold indifference to this inter-
change of life; they have noth-
ing to do with love, except the
supplying of these love-seeds,
that, moving about in the water,
seek each other.

But higher in the scale of life,
where the two sexes are sepa-
rate, the attraction felt by egg-
cell and sperm-cell is reflected
in the parents themselves, and
there comes into existence that
powerful and subtle force known
a3 sex instinct.

Darting about among the asci-
dians and the jelly-fishes, for

fish Life. 39

instance, there are creatures that show no indiffer-
ence to each other. The slim, swift fishes cutting
the water so gracefully with their boat-shaped forms
tell another story of life and love.

As far as the origin and structure of their repro-
ductive material is concerned, there is no essential
difference between them and the ascidians; that
is, eggs and sperm-cells are budded off from a cer-
tain part of the interior of each individual. Both
eggs and sperm-cells are not found in the same
fish, however. We have here, as in all the higher
life, male and female.

In the female are found the egg-cells, which are
produced by a certain tissue forming a double sac,
shaped something like an old-fashioned silk-purse.
Each lobe of this sac is called an ovary, and the
two ovaries are a definite and permanent part of
the creature’s body. They produce the eggs, or
ova, and these when ripe break away from the
ovary, and finally pass out of the body of the
parent into the water.

The eggs keep forming in the ovaries, however,
so when one set is ripe, another is growing. Most
people are familiar with fish eggs under the name
of roe. Those of the shad are considered a deli-
cacy, and in the South the roe of the mullet is
dried and kept for future use. The eggs of these
fish, as is well known, are about the size of a small
pin-head. In smaller fish they are often a good deal
smaller, but seldom, like the sperm-cells, so small
as to be invisible.

40 Life and Love.

In the male fish are found sacs similar to the
ovaries of the female, containing the tiny sperm-
cells, so tiny that they cannot be seen without the
aid of the microscope.

They are mixed with a milky fluid substance,
also secreted by the sperm-sac, so that the whole
sperm-sac is not unlike the ovary in size and
consistency.

This fluid is well named the fertilizing fluid, con-
taining, as it does, the sperm, or fertilizing, cells.

The reproductive cells at certain seasons of the
year ripen, and the fish are then ready to perform
their reproductive functions.

The ripe egg-cells have stored up within them
an incredible amount of vitality, for in each is
almost the possibility of becoming a perfect fish;
they are thrilling with life and unexpressed power,
and the presence of these life-cells imparts a
strange and powerful magnetism to every cell in
the fish’s bedy, as the presence of a strong mag-
net affects every particle of iron in its ncighbor-
hood.

In the male fish the microscopic sperm-cells are
also ripe and thrilling with life, and they send their
message pulsing through the whole fish-body.

The male and female, thus powerfully charged
with opposite attractions, are irresistibly drawn, the
one to the other.

As is the case with other charged bodies, this
excessive accumulation of a particular kind of force

fish Life. 41

is capable of being discharged and of leaving the
body again neutral.

In addition to the great emotional disturbance,
the tremendous activity of the reproductive season
causes marvellous changes of structure to take
place, changing the form in various ways, and often
causing the skin to glow with brilliant colors.

These changes continue until the reproductive
elements are fully ripe and ready to be eliminated.

When this time comes, the female fish instinc-
tively secks a spot suitable for the development of
her offspring, and in depositing her burden of eggs
also becomes free from accompanying emotional
and physical phenomena.

The eggs once laid, the characteristic vitality of
the breeding season subsides.

This period of intense activity is over. The fire
is quenched, calm and a greater stability reign
through the cells of the body.

The male is even more affected by the repro-
ductive activity; overwhelmed by the force of the
vital action that so possesses his whole being, he
too finally discharges the battery by freeing him-
self from the presence of the intensely vital sperm-
cells.

Powerfully attracted by the female, he accom-
panies her to the breeding place, and when she has
laid the eggs, affected by some subtle instinct of
love and desire for life, he pours upon their waiting,
uncertain life the fertilizing fluid which is to stimu-

42 Life and Love.

late their power of growth from a possibility to a
certainty.

The fertilizing fluid once eliminated, peace
reigns. The brilliant coloring fades again to the
ordinary garb; the season of love, of highest
inspiration, of most. tremendous vital activity, is,
for the time, over.

Marvellous is this condition while it lasts, fortu-
nate that its period is brief, or how could the
fragile form sustain this raging fire? It would be
overwhelmed, consumed; it would literally die of
love, as, in truth, it sometimes does.

The fervor of love over, the parents no longer
feel the same attraction for each other’s society.
The ordinary course of life suffices,

But when love ceases in them, it begins its mar-
vellous work in their offspring.

The egg-cells lie waiting, passive but eager.
The sperm-cells, active, eager, seek to become
united with the egg-cells.

In each egg-cell it may be said is half life; in
each sperm-cell the other half; and these two
halves in uniting become whole.

Egg and sperm cells differ from each other in
other ways than the mere possession of opposite
attractive power.

All egg-cells are essentially the same, no matter
what creature may be their source, while sperm-
cells differ greatly in form and activity.

Compared with the sperm-cell, the cgg-cell is

Fish Life.

large, quiescent, and contains a large
amount of nutriment, which goes towards
the formation of at least the first stages
of the young animal. It is usually spher-
ical, or nearly so, in form.

The sperm-cell is small, active, contains
very little nutritive material, and is gener-
ally composed of a larger part or ‘“ head,”
and a long slender contractile ‘ tail,”
“which,” we are told, “ working behind
like a screw, propels the essential head
through the water or along the ducts.”

Some of the forms of the sperm-cell are
drawn at the side of the page; beginning
at the top and reading down, they are:
thread-worm, crayfish, sponge, lobster,
crab, dog, rabbit, mouse, dog, pig.

The sperm-cell of the human being is
of the same nature, consisting of a blunt,
oblong * head,” and a long, slender, whip-
like portion.

Thus, while the egg-cells of different
creatures are constant in form, differing
mainly in the amount of nutriment they
store up, the sperm-cells are extremely
variable, and while the “ head” and “ tail”
characterize those of most animals, ‘ occa-
sionally,” we are told, “there is a depart-
ure from the predominant phase of cell-
life. Thus in the thread-worm, the sperm

43

44 Life and Love.

has a blunt, pear-shaped form, and exhibits slight
amceboid movements. In some crustaceans and
other arthropods, the cell is even more quiescent,
and may exhibit curious forms such as that figured
for the crayfish. The relatively dominant activity
may, however, wake up, and the sperm exhibit
active amceboid movements.”

The sperm-cells, be it remembered, are so mi-
nute as to be totally invisible to the naked eye. The
fertilizing fluid of the fish, for instance, gives no
hint of the presence of the sperm-cells until it is
viewed through the microscope. In studying na-
ture one soon comes to understand that size is
merely relative and essentially unimportant. A
creature invisible to the human eye may be a
veritable mammoth compared to another creature
so tiny that the strongest powers of the microscope
have to be used to discover it. And so the sperm-
cells, although as invisible to the naked eye as
though they did not exist, have an organization
and a fleeting life of their own, —a life less fleeting,
and fraught with great results, if they meet with
conditions favorable to their development, and can,
by union with an egg-cell, help to create a complex
form.

Upon examination and comparison of egg-cell
and sperm-cell we are particularly impressed by
the difference in their power of independent motion.

Activity is the law of the sperm-cell; passzizty,
of the egg-cell.

fish Life. 45

These characteristics of the reproductive ele-
ments are expressed through the whole individual
as well, — the female being, as a rule, passive; the
male, active.

The passive female cell, large and well nour-
ished, lies quiet; the active male cell, irresis-
tibly allured by its presence, moves eagerly to
join it.

When dropped into the water the egg-cell of the
fish, alive, magnetic, but motionless, awaits the com-
ing of its preserver. He will come; she need make
no effort to go to him.

The sperm-cell, when dropped into the water
near the egg-cell, exhibits no such calmness. It
shows great unrest, and eagerly seeks the egg-cell,
which it strives to penetrate.

As there are many more sperm-cells than egg-
cells, and as only one sperm-cell, it would seem,
can unite with each egg-cell, it follows that but few
of the sperm-cells are able to continue life.

The egg-cell has but one point of ingress, and
this a sperm-cell finally discovers.

Under the microscope these active forms have
been seen eagerly moving around and around the
egg until one, more fortunate than the rest, finds
admission and dissolves into the substance of the
egg, —not to be finally lost, however, for, as we
know, this inexplicable union results in the growth
of a new creature like neither parent, and yet like
both, each cell having given to the new life certain

46 Life and Love.

characteristics of the creature from which it was
derived.

It is a subject of never-ending wonder that
within each of these tiny reproductive cells lie
hidden all the peculiarities of the parent from
which it came.

In a trout egg, or a trout sperm-cell, is contained
trouthood. Form, size, spots, habits, all are in
some mysterious way impressed upon these atoms
budded off from the body of the parent.

And the mystery is overwhelming when we re-
flect that not only can the tiny reproductive cell
transmit the peculiarities of the creature from
which it came, but also those of ancestors many
generations removed.

Crustaceans. 47

VI.
CRUSTACEANS.

ERY radical and far-reaching is the reproduc-
tive change which takes place during the
breeding season. Even in the
higher life great parental sac-
rifice is involved, and the
whole body undergoes pro-
found modifications under the
sway of the reproductive
force. During the breeding
season life speeds along as
it were under high pressure,
the vital activity prodigious
ly increased in certain parts
of the organism, and cor-
respondingly decreased in
others. It is a law of life
that excessive activity of one
system is accompanied by decreased or suspended
activity of others.
So, for instance, when the reproductive activity
is at its height the digestive and assimilative activ-
ities are partly or wholly suspended; this may be

48 Life and Love.

a condition of longer or shorter duration; where
it is of long duration it produces as a rule a fatal
effect. The creature undergoing such loss and
not repairing it by added nutriment cannot regain
its strength, and its life terminates.

A terrific exhaustion accompanies the reproduc-
tive act in our fishes. After the loss of a million or
more eggs, accompanied by diminished vitality in
all the cells, there is not much left of a cod! Often
the male salmon does not even survive the phenom-
enal changes which come over him at that period.
These changes are often accompanied by long-
suspended nutrition. He loses his appetite, and
during the period of greatest reproductive activity,
when the most powerful demand is made upon his
resources, eats little or nothing, thus failing to
make good the loss. He is so brimful of activity
in certain parts that unusual growths result; his
teeth get long, his mouth grows long and hooked,
so that sometimes he cannot even close it; his
scales disappear, sunk in the spongy skin which
grows up about them, his color changes from
silvery to rosy red, or a darker red, or even to a
blackish color, according to his variety; and with
these physical changes comes a no less marked
emotional activity, — he grows fierce and irritable,
and indulges in destructive combats with his
fellows.

These strange growths and changes, as has been
noticed, take place at the expense of the material

Crustaceans. 49

already in the body. His own individuality is
apparently of no value; he finds himself in the
grasp of a power far greater than himself. He no
longer belongs to himself, but to his race, and un-
conscious of what animates him and threatens his
very existence, yields himself to the cosmic force
which through him reaches out to that greater and
more important fact in nature, his race. That he
be preserved is not essential; that his race con-
tinue is all-important.

In the female, analogous changes occur, though
they are less marked.

As a rule among all creatures, the tissues of the
male are, like the sperm-cell, characterized by more
intense activity, by greater tendency to change,
than are those of the female. She is structurally
more quiescent, he more active.

When the breeding season approaches the salmon
animated by a gencral impulse, leave the sea in
great numbers, and hasten up the rivers. Some-
times for hundreds of miles they go, resistlessly
impelled by the power within. Overwhelmed by
this vital activity they rush along, over rapids, over
rocks, — bruised, mangled, never stopping, eating
no food, intent only upon the one supreme act of
their lives.

Finally, they select their breeding-place; the
eggs are laid, the fertilizing fluid poured over them;
they are covered with stones and gravel by the
parents, and left to their fate.

4

50 Life and Love.

So great is the fatigue of the salmon that go long
distances, and so destructive the changes undcr-
gone by the too powerfully affected male, that few
of the latter survive the ordeal.

Like certain of the insects, a brief season of in-
tense love is followed by speedy death.

The salmon that stay near the sea survive the
reproductive act, though they are much depleted
by it, and both sexes are for a time rendered unfit
for food, so great is the loss they undergo.

The spawning season over, if they survive the
crisis, the fish regain appetite, and in time are
plump and oily again,—a condition which vora-
cious man renders almost as fatal to them as is that
of the breeding season.

The depletion of the fish is chiefly due to the
vast amount of reproductive material it elaborates.
Its condition in life is such that there is great
waste of this material, only a comparatively small
portion living and developing to maturity.

The fish drops her eggs into the water, the male
covers them with the fertilizing fluid, and they are
left, tender atoms of life, to meet and overcome
incredible perils.

Unprotected, the eggs, and even the young fish,
fall a prey to other creatures, for very few fishes
protect their offspring.

Some do; the graceful stickleback, for instance,
builds a dainty and elaborat2 nest, but most fishes
pay no attention to the eggs after having laid them

Crustaceans. 51

in a suitable place. And besides all the other
water creatures that relish fresh eggs, the fishes
themselves are sad cannibals.

Although they will not eat their own eggs, many
do not hesitate to devour the eggs of other species,
wherever they can find them.

So the million eggs of a cod are none too many
to insure even a small progeny to each fish.

Not all creatures are as prodigal of life as are
the fishes, however.

Many have most elaborate structures for the
preservation of the reproductive cells until they are
hatched,

The lobster, for instance, cannot trust its precious
life-cells to the tender mercy of the creatures of the
deep. It preserves its eggs and sperm-cells, and
ingeniously adapts its jointed body to the uses of a
nursery.

Recall the structure of the lobster in order to
understand this.

There is a solid front portion of the body to
which the legs are attached, and a hind portion
which is in rings, like the body of a caterpillar.

Two little leaf-like parts, or swimmerets, are
attached to the under side of each ring. The
openings of the egg-tubes are found on the inner
joint of the third pair of legs, counting from the
back; and inthe male the openings of the tubes
to the sperm-sacs are found on the inner joints of
the last pair of legs. In the male the last two pairs

52 Life and Love.

of swimmerets, instead of being soft and flexible, are
hard and horny, and assist in conveying the sperm
to the cgg-cells, so that the eggs are fertilized
before they leave the body of the female. Thus is
obviated the great waste of male reproductive
material, which is sustained by so many of the
fishes,

After being fertilized, the eggs are laid, but
instead of dropping into the water they adhere
firmly to the swimmerets of the female, which are
somewhat broader than those of the male, and
during the breeding season covered with a sticky
substance which glues the eggs fast until they
hatch; when the tiny lobsters, in turn, cling to the
protecting swimmerets of the mother until able to
care for themselves.

Moreover, to protect these precious eggs and
helpless young from being scraped off as she
moves about, or snatched off by hungry and heart-
less creatures, the lobster doubles her body under,
as lobsters know so well howto do, and keeps
it doubled, thus forming a safe asylum for the
brood.

Thus also in the lobster do we find sex modif-
cations besides those of the reproductive tissues,
the male swimmerets being changed into horny
“claspers,” to assist in the felicitous disposition of
the sperm-cells; and the female swimmerets being
broad, leaf-like, and covered with a special secre-
tion used to attach the eggs.

Crustaceans. 53

Some of the crustaceans — which is the name of
the large family to which the lobster belongs —
have skin changes which remind one of what hap-
pens to the salmon during the breeding season;
only, these skin changes are utilized in a very clever
way, for they form a receptacle where the eggs are
deposited as in a nest, and in some of these a fluid
is secreted which is used as food for the young!

Thus the parent is enabled to perform the
most perfect parental functions, and in her own
body find home and nutriment for her helpless
descendants.

54 Life and Love.

VIL.
METAMORPHOSIS OF INSECTS.

TRANGE as it may seem to the casual ob-

server, first cousin to the lobster’s family is

the great family of Insects; a wonderful family in

its variety and complexity, and particularly re-
markable in its reproductive organization.

Life finds its culmination in love, nowhere more
wonderfully than among the insects.

With many of them it is literally true that to
love is todie. This is so, we remember, with the
spirogyra; it is so with countless of the low forms
of life; even among the fishes the great trans-
formation is often followed by death ; but nowhere
is this sequence more tragic than among the
insects.

Strange indeed is the life of the insect! In the
vast majority of cases its whole existence appears
to be but a preparation for a brief moment of
transcendent life, — followed speedily by total ex-
tinction.

As an ege it starts upon its precarious career.

oD
Its parent places it as well as she can; places,

Metamorphosis of Insects. 55

then leaves it to find its own way through the
strange world it has never seen, while she, as a rule,
her destiny accomplished, departs to dic.

From the egg there issues, very often, a helpless,
wingless creature; from the egg of a butterfly
creeps forth a caterpillar; from that of many
beetles comes a soft and tender grub; from that
of a fly there springs a maggot.

These tender larve, wingless, earth-bound, liter-
ally eat their way through the world. Voraciously
they store up nutriment for the change that is to
come, growing so rapidly that they soon find their
skin too small to hold them, and are obliged to
split it open and crawl out, sometimes satisfying
their voracity by devouring the cast-off garment.

This happens several times in the course of the
creature’s larval life, perhaps from three to ten
being the most usual number of moults, though
Sir John Lubbock assures us that he counted
twenty-one moults in a may-fly!

Some insects pass through this lowly larval
stage in a few days or weeks, others remain thus
undeveloped for a year, while still others require
several years to eat themselves into condition for
the next change, the pupa state, which is one of
seeming rest.

When the time for this new change arrives, the
voracious larva loses its appetite, grows restless,
and finally spins for itself a silken cocoon, or wraps
itself in chips or bits of earth, or buries itself in the

56 Life and Love.

ground, or otherwise, according to its nature, pro-
vides for a season of external inaction.

This inaction is only apparent, however; one
looks at the pupa and finds the legs gone, while
the jaws and other instruments for obtaining food
or working its way into hard substances have dis-
appeared. It is but a well-swathed mummy in
appearance. A living mummy it soon proves, how-
ever ; for though so quiet outside, within, the most
remarkable changes have been taking place.

If it be a caterpillar, all the nutriment and
strength stored up by its much converting of food
into caterpillar is here made use of in transform-
ing the unwieldy larva into the graceful butter-
fly.

In time it shakes off its pupa case, and steps
forth resplendent; winged, active, bright, and beau-
tiful, it flashes through the air.

In this state it is called an Imago, concerning
which the “ Century Dictionary ” says: —

“ The name is due to the fact that such an insect,
having passed through its larval stages, and hav-
ing, as it were, cast off its mask or disguise, has
become a true representation or image of its
species.”

Having cast off its disguise! Having lived suc-
cessively through state after state which bore no
resemblance to its final form, it entered into its
perfect self!

Think of the metamorphoses of a butterfly !

Metamorphosis of Insects. 57

First an egg, then a caterpillar, then a motion-
less, mummy-like form, then a winged creature.

From lowly earth forms it rises to a condition
which almost transcends physical existence. It
has cast off the implements of its lower life; the
clumsy feet, where are they? the horny jaws?
there is no trace left, — delicate are the organs
with which it walks over the flowers; gone is the
ugly mouth with its cutting and grinding parts ;
instead, a long and thread-like tube is coiled up
like a watch-spring, to be uncoiled and daintily
thrust into flower depths to draw forth nectar. For
a few brief hours it is one with joy and light and
beauty. It can leave the earth, it can drink the
honey of flowers.

Its old work-a-day life is forgotten; it is more a
spirit than a body.

And this resplendent form, this winged beauty,
is its vestment of love.

The great passion animates it only in this form.

It has blossomed into love, and through love
passes on to the other great transformation —
death.

Love is the climax of its life; its fate is to live
and love for a brief season in joyous unconcern,
sipping honey from the flowers, glinting the sun-
light from its resplendent scales.

And may not a few hours of this life be worth
untold ages of creeping in the dust, of lying insen-
sate in the earth?

58 Life and Love.

To man one vision of God is worth xons of
unhallowed life; one great thrill of inspiration,
of knowledge, is worth years of sordid common
sensation.

And is not the butterfly too, in its glorified state,
animated by the same transcendent joy of life, of
nearness to the Infinite, that make its few final
hours of life and love count as ages of less exalted
existence ?

But now for the end, for close upon life is death;
love is to end in oblivion; or is this transforma-
tion, death, but another pupa form, in which the
crude earth vestment falls away from some finer
essence of being?

Egg, larva, pupa; through these lowly forms
the butterfly has passed, finally to merge resplen-
dent as Imago, the image of the specics!

In this transfigured form love thrills the winged
creatures, and to love they now give up their lives.
They approach each other; in rapid flight through
the air they meet, they embrace; a brief period
of this marvellous love-flight crowns their winged
life, and then the drama of earth has been played
to the end.

In them life culminates in love; there is no be-
yond but that other strange life, that new meta-
morphosis which man calls death.

In those brief moments of supremest love is
exhausted the whole reservoir of physical strength
which the creature has so laboriously accumulated.

Metamorphosis of Insects. 59

It lived, maybe several months, lowly and unin-
spired, preparing for this fleeting and wonderful
expression of its existence.

Faint, sated with all that life can give, totally
exhausted by this final, supreme act, the male
passes from his brief love-flight to the inexorable
and mysterious realm of death.

How sacred, then, does this act of love appear!
Love and Death, the two great mysteries of earthly
life, linked in this primal, unexplained relation, the
one to the other.

The female hastens to deposit her burden of
eggs upon some plant whose foliage will be useful
to those dear ones whom she will never see, and
then she too passes on to extinction.

Some insects live for several years in the larval
stages, and then acquire wings, and live and love
for a brief period, in that short space concentrating
and consuming the vitality it has taken years to
accumulate.

Tragic indeed is the tale of the mayflies; for
two or three years the larve live in the mud under
stones or among grass in the bottom of running
streams, their voracity armed with long, hard,
sickle-shaped jaws, with which to seize small
aquatic insects.

Finally they emerge into the imago state, deli-
cate, fairy forms on gossamer wings. Gone are
the terrible jaws, a mere trace of a mouth remain-
ing, for they will never again taste food. All that

60 Life and Love.

is laborious has passed away; only two things

remain for them: love, isolated from earthly affairs,

and death, the mysterious companion of love.

They will flash in the sun but a few hours.
Delicate as morning mist they emerge from the
mud, love, then give back to earth the
seeds of their love, and die, all in the
course of a short summer day.

It is not surprising that the ancients
should have seen in the butterfly, emerg-
ing winged, beautiful, from the lowly
earth-bound chrysalis, a symbol of the
=< human soul.

\ eter The Greek word “psyche”
means both sowl and butterfly.
And in Greek mythology we find

the beautiful maiden Psyche, the per-

sonified and deificd soul, often repre-
sented with the wings of a butterfly.

In this beautiful fancy of the old
Grecks, Psyche, as is most fitting, is
the beloved of Eros, the God of Love,
t <— who also is winged.

Ze F .

MK Speaking of the final transformation

of the insect, Michelet, in his book

entitled ‘“ The Insect,” says: —

“Love is winged. Mythology is perfectly in
the right. This is verified in the proper sense and
without metaphor. In one brief moment nature
displays a restless anxicty to fly towards the

Metamorphosis of Insects. 61

beloved object. All creatures rise above their own
level, all mount toward the light, on the pinions
of desire. The internal fire is also revealed in
glowing colors. Every one decorates his person,
every one wishes to please.

“The butterfly apparently looks upon you with
the great velvety eyes which adorn its wings.
Beetles of every species, like mobile stones, aston-
ish by their brilliant reflexes, their burning viva-
cities. Finally, from the bosom of the shadows
bursts the flame of love, naked and unveiled, in
flashing stars!

“ At such a moment it accomplishes the strangest
transformations, and from the humblest masks issue,
in violent contrast, the superbest individuals.

“A dull larva of the morass, which lives only by
stratagem, becomes the brilliant amazon, the agile
winged warrior, called Demoiselle! (libellula). It
is the only creature of its tribe which expresses the
complete liberty of flight, holding the same rank
among insects as the swallow among birds. Who
has not followed with attentive gaze its thousand
varied movements, its turns and returns, and the
infinite circles which it makes with azure and
emerald wings on the meadow or over the waters?
A flight apparently capricious, but not really so,
for it is a chase, a rapid and elegant extermination
of myriads of insects. What seems to you a pas-

1 Dragon-fly, Devil’s Darning-needle, Mosquito Hawk are
the common names for this insect.

62 Life and Love.

time, is the greedy absorption with which this
brilliant creature of war feeds its season of love.
“Do not believe that these riches are simply the
gifts of genial climates; that these glittering festal
garments which they assume to love and die in are
only the sheen of the sun, the all-powerful decora-
tor, which with its rays intensifies the enamel and
gems we admire upon their wings. Another sun —
a sun which shines for the whole earth, even for the
ice-regions of the pole — profits them far more con-
siderably. It exalts in them the inner life, evokes
all their powers, and, on the given day, calls forth
the supreme flower. Yonder scintillating colors
are their visible energies which become speaking
and eloquent. It is the pride of a complete life,
which, having attained its climax, displays its
energy in triumph, wishes to expand
and diffuse; it is the tradition of de-
sire, the imperious prayer and urgent
appeal to the beloved objects.”

“S Les

a nee
: i Zbl.
seep tho Puce

1

Reproduction of Insects. 63

VIII.

REPRODUCTION OF INSECTS.

URING the period of transformation from egg
to imago the internal organs as well as the
external paits of the insect un-
dergo profound changes.
Whoever has looked at a
caterpillar, and then at the
chrysalis or pupa, hair-less, leg-
less, quiescent, and then at the
winged imago, can easily believe
that the tissues have undergone
great alteration; but while some
structures disappear entirely and
others come into existence, ‘he reproduc-
tive glands are present from the begin-
ning. They can be traced from one end
of the line of development to the other;
in the larva they may be seen, and through the
pupa they persist to mature in the imago.
This egg material, like the amoeba, seems to
have great power to live.
The whole life of the insect appears to be one
vast, complex, stupendous preparation, whose end
is love.

64 Life and Love.

Wonderful instruments are furnished it, that it
may successfully perpetuate its kind.

Like its cousin the lobster, the insect, in its
imago or perfect state has a body, the
latter part of which is composed of
rings. There are ten or eleven of these
rings, the ones toward the head being
very like each other, but toward the
tail end there is a marked alteration in
“size and form.

The last three or four segments or rings are
usually very much reduced in size, particularly on
the under side, thus causing the end of the body to
curve in.

These smaller segments give rise to certain long,
slender growths on the under side, ultimately form-
ing tubes, capable in some cases of being with-
drawn into the body.

These terminal organs, in some species, are very
complicated.

As in other creatures, the ovaries of the insect
lie one on each side of the inner cavity of the body,
egg-tubes or oviducts leading from them to the
outer world. In the male, sperm-sacs and sperm-

ducts take the place of ovaries and oviducts.

The oviducts and sperm-ducts communicate at
their outer opening with the elongated terminal
organs, which, in fact, form tunnels through which
the cggs and sperm-cells may be safely conducted
to any given point.

Reproduction of Lnsects. 65

In the female, the long terminal organs form the
ovipositor, or egg depositor.

By means of this the female is able to conduct
the egg from the oviduct to a place suitable for its
development. She does not merely drop her egg
to find a lodging where it may, as the fish so often
does, but by means of the long tubular ovipositor
often places it in positions which without this
instrument would be totally inaccessible.

The ovipositor assumes a great variety of forms
in the different species.

Sometimes it is not a closed tube, but made of
separate grooved blades, which fit together to
form a tube when so needed. The blades may be
toothed like a saw, may be tipped with a sting
which connects with a poison sac, or may end in
a sharp point or drill, for boring holes in hard
substances; in short, may be modified in an in-
credible number of ways.

This ovipositor, this egg-conductor, is the fe-
male’s priceless means of defence, and her imple-
ment for finding ingress into difficult, but for the
offspring, desirable, places.

The saw-fly uses the toothed blades of the ovi-
positor to cut incisions in leaves and stems, where
it then deposits the eggs.

The wound so made is, in some cases, accom-
panied by a secretion which irritates the plant
tissue, so that it grows up about the egg in the
form of a “ gall,” or little hollow chamber, in which
the egg cosily develops. 5

66 Life and Love.

The galls so often seen on trecs and bushes are
the result of the intrusion under the skin of leaf or
twig, of an egg or eggs, by some insect.

The gall-fly sometimes covers the leaves of the
oak with the result of itsindustry. Thus, by means
of its wonderful ovipositor, does one of the most
delicate of the insect tribe compel the mighty oak
to cradle its offspring.

Endless are the devices of insects to insure the
welfare of offspring, which they will not live to
behold.

What mysterious wisdom informs them concern-
ing the food of their larve, food which they them-
selves no longer use, and leads them to place the
egg in contact with that food, thus spreading the
table of their offspring, enabling them to eat at
once, and so gain strength to care further for
themselves?

The Ichneumon fly has, in some cases, an enor-
mously long ovipositor, which she inserts in crev-
ices in the bark of trees, in order that she may
deposit her eggs, not in the bark of the tree, but
in the body of some unfortunate caterpillar which
has there taken refuge! The caterpillar is thus
compelled to render up its own life to form nour-
ishment for its unwelcome and voracious guests,
Insects are no better than fishes in their cannibalistic
tendencies, one species not hesitating to devour
members of another species, or to feed its young
at the expense of other insect life.

Reproduction of Lnsects. 67

Certain wasps use the powerful weapon with
which they are provided, to sting other insects,
which are thereby paralyzed, and in this condition
stored in the nests to feed young wasps. Thus is
a store of living food laid up.

A caterpillar stung by a wasp will often trans-
form into a chrysalis or pupa, though too weak to
change to a moth, and thus feebly living will yield
itself as food to its enemy.

Insects have no greater foes than each other.
Constantly threatened by the sister life about them,
as well as by innumerable other foes, the exorbi-
tant fertility of the insect results, as a rule, in the
maturing of but few offspring.

The ovipositor is the mother’s greatest hope in
insuring success to her offspring. By its help she
can hide her eggs, supply provisions for them, or
otherwise assist them to a position of advantage in
the struggle for life upon which they must enter.

The grasshopper uses her large, strong oviposi-
tor to bore holes in the ground, or in stems of
plants, and into these holes the same hollow ovi-
positor conducts the eggs as they leave the
oviduct.

The katydid uses the end of her ovipositor to
shave off and roughen the bark of the twig upon
which she lays her eggs, fastening them in place
by a gummy substance which she exudes.

Thus do we find the egg-duct of the insect sup-
plemented by a powerful auxiliary that pierces, or

68 Life and Love.

saws, or bores, or stings in the interest of the
egg,

In the male the last segments of the body are
also modified to assist in the important office
assigned to him.

The outgrowths from the lower side of the hin-
der abdominal segments take the form of powerful
intromittent organs, which are often furnished with
complicated claspers to hold them in place while
the sperm-cells are being conveyed, or “ intromit-
ted” to the oviduct, there to mingle with the egg-
cells before they leave the body of the female, and
with a minimum of waste, secure life to the being
imprisoned within the egg.

In many insects this transference takes place
during flight.

Generally it is soon followed by the death of
both male and female, the female living only long
enough to wield that wonderful and complicated
mechanism by which she is enabled to place her
eggs in positions of advantage.

The ovipositor, like the wings, is the dowry of
the imago. As a rule, the larva is devoid of this
complicated mechanism in the female, and the
equally complicated intromittent organ of the male.
Only for the brief hours of its winged life do these
complex structures come into existence.

Oftentimes the female is provided with a recep-
tacle for storing up the sperm-cells of the male.

This is the case with the bec, where only once

Reproduction of Insects. 69

does the female receive from the male a supply of
this essential material. Only once does he make
the mysterious and fateful transference of his life to
her. He gives all in this one act, then is doomed to
death, while his germ-cells, nourished in some mys-
terious way by the female, live on, sometimes for in-
credible lengths of time, — even for years, and she,
thus permanently supplied, fertilizes her eggs at will.

The domestic life of the bees is more or less
familiar to every one. With them the queen is
the most important member of the community.
She is tenderly reared and sumptuously fed, and
all her life long guarded and protected. Only once
does she depart alone from the hive. The drone is
the male bee, stingless and helpless. He, too,
leaves the hive —once. Upon the return of the
queen from her nuptial flight she is possessed of
a store of sperm-cells, which she keeps in a little
sac to use at her pleasure. The supply has been
known to last for five years.

Unfertilized eggs develop into drones, those
which have been fertilized become either workers
or queens.

The hapless drone, when once his office has
been fulfilled is not allowed to return to the nest.
He is no longer necessary to the economy of the
hive, he is but a tax upon the strength of the
workers; ruthlessly they usurp the power which
nature exercises in many of the other insects, and
put him to death.

70 Life and Love.

His life culminates and ends in his power to
reproduce his race. That is his only excuse for
existing, his companions seem to think. Helpless,
stingless, he is cared for by his hive-mates until
he has provided life for future generations.

In her season of greatest activity the queen bee
sometimes lays as many as two or three thousand
eggs a day, and in the course of her life may lay
more than a million; and this astounding number
of eggs she is able to fertilize by that one gift from
the drone!

On the surface it seems a harsh decree that
takes from him his life in return for such inesti-
mable service, but when one looks beyond the one
drone into the great world of bees, striving for
their place in nature’s crowded courts, one loses
sight of the individual and is borne along in sym-
pathy for the whole beautiful race, struggling to
insure its continucd existence, it may be for some
final end, some development undreamed of by the
man of to-day.

Unlike the butterfly, the bee is not exhausted
beyond recovery by the labor of maternity, in part
perhaps because her hive-mates have kept her so
bountifully nourished from the very beginning,
and continue to supply her with the nutriment
which will most quickly repair her loss.

Her obligation in life is to reproduce; the
workers, which are practically sexless, have no
obligation but to care for their teeming queen and

Reproduction of Lnsccts. a

for the young with which she replenishes their
ranks.

They supply the food, build the nests, rear the
young; they know life, but not love. They live
not more than eight months, then die, their places
filled by those nurslings they have not mothered,
but faithfully have tended.

Protected and cared for, the queen bee lives
longer than most other adult insects. Even her
amazing fertility does not exhaust her beyond
repair,

Where other insects are prevented from losing
the vitality contained in their reproductive material
they, too, have been known to live beyond the
ordinary limits of their kind. In one instance a
butterfly was thus kept for over two years in a hot-
house, when in the natural order of life he would
have expended his reproductive force, and his race
would have been run in a few short days.

Quite at the mercy of their surroundings, the
insects do not, asa rule, attempt individual pres-
ervation; the individual is allowed to perish, the
whole effort being towards preserving the race by
supplying material for new generations.

Even the wings of some species are but means
to this end. It is said that after the nuptial flight
ants bite off their own wings! They have no fur-
ther use for them, and they are but an incum-
brance; their lives henceforth must be concentrated
upon securing offspring to succeed them.

72 Life and Love.

In some insects only the male is winged; the
female quiescent, attractive, waits to be approached.

As a rule the female among insects is larger than
the male, and in some low forms of insect life the
male is reduced to a tiny parasite upon the large
and well-nourished female.

Brief as are the adult lives of the insects, it may
be, that measured by their intensity rather than by
their duration, they sum up as much that makes
for life as the more extended and less intensely
vital lives of other creatures. In their brief exist-
ence they find time for the more esthetic pleas-
ures, and the joys of courtship are one of their
possessions.

It would seem, according to Darwin, that their
love of color influences their selection of a mate,
the female in some species yielding to the charms
of a brilliant suitor, and scorning the advances of a
dull one.

Thus, through her individual taste, does she in
her selection of a mate give a brilliant inheritance
to her descendants, and people the earth with those
animated emeralds and rubics and bits of flame
with which every one is familiar.

Any one interested in the lower life and its won-
derful manifestations can by watching the grass-
hoppers on a summer day witness many amusing
love-scenes. My lady understands her importance
in the economy of nature, apparently, and also
enjoys the suspense of her lovers.

Reproduction of Insects. 7

She is both coy and inviting, and the males prac-
tise their most alluring arts, flying and wheeling
and whirring, and chirping for her edification in
the hope of finally proving irresistible.

The female spider is, perhaps, the being most
powerfully imbued with a sense of feminine
importance.

In some instances the male, small, wary, timid, in
mortal terror, as well he may be, of his fierce lady-
love, loyal to his race, hands her, on his palpi, or
movable mouth-parts, his store of sperm-cells, and
she snatches the precious gift, and then longing for
still closer union with her beloved also snatches
him, if he is not quick enough to escape, and
eating him up, literally makes
him a part of herself!

This is a union which the
spider himself does not whol-
ly approve, and he is ex-
tremely cautious in
approaching his too
loving spouse.

74

Life and Love

IX.

FLOWERS AND INSECTS.

LOSELY intertwined with the life of the insect
is that of the flower, and in many respects

AG
eal

there is quite a remarkable similarity
between the two.

Justice could not be done to the great
cycle of Life and Love without tak-
ing into consideration the blooming of
plants, which is the imago or butterfly
state of their existence.

The plant, like the animal, is depend-
ent upon food for its existence; also,
like it, upon air, moisture, warmth, and
for its continued existence, upon repro-
duction. The plant is the real arbiter

i ia of life. It is the link between the in-

animate and the animate worlds. Stand-
ing upon the very brink of existence, it
converts inorganic matter into living
material, and on the other hand finds
itself vitally connected with animal life.

It retains the primal and unique
power of transforming mineral matter

wee into living tissue. Place it in
Me ee a :
era e 7am water containing in solution the

flowers and Insects. 75

elements it needs, — nitrates, potash, lime, magne-
sia, silica, or what not, —- and it will grow as merrily
as though standing root-deep in the earth. Con-
tentedly it will fall upon these intractable, lifeless
substances, and persuade them to combine in ways
new to their habit, until they find themselves no
longer cold mineral elements or compounds, but a
vital combination, with new and wonderful powers.
These tissues, formed thus from the rocks and gases,
are the reliance of the animal for subsistence, so
that all or nearly all animal life is sustained by this
vast store of food made ready by plant life.

To a very limited extent only can the animal
convert minerals and gases into living tissue; that
power it has lost, and relies upon the vegetable
world to stand between it and annihilation.

The vegetable world is the benign providence,
the never-failing nurse of the animal world. And
all the life of the animal world it shares. It is
born, waxes, wanes, reproduces, dies.

In spirogyra we saw the dawning of love in the
life of the plant, and higher in the vegetable world
we find life depending upon the union of two.

Like the animal, the plant passes through all
stages of complexity in its reproductive life.

Here as elsewhere reproduction is but a budding
off of a portion of the parent, — adiscreet budding
of such a cell or cells as in some mysterious way
bears the impress of the whole personality of the
plant.

76 Life and Love.

In the vegetable, as in the animal world, all de-
grees of complexity are observable in the method
of reproduction.

The fern, for instance, as a part of its reproduc-
tive activity, employs the primitive method of cast-
ing off buds from the skin; from the under side of
the leaf, as a rule, it gives forth tiny spores in
countless numbers. These spores are enclosed in
cases symmetrically arranged in groups, sometimes
along the margin of the leaf, sometimes along the
central rib, sometimes thickly clustered over other
parts of the surface.

The leaf so given up to spore-bearing is fre-
quently different from the other leaves, being
smaller, thicker, duller. It is the old story; its
nutrition having gone to the making of spores,
there is little left for the leaf itself.

Every one knows the fern in its spore-bearing
state, its fronds heavily laden with the dark-brown
or black or other colored patches of spores or
“ dust.”

These spores are necessary to the reproduction
of the plant, but are not true seed, for those are the
product of a higher form of plant life.

The ferns, the mosses, and all the flowerless
plants belong to the lower ranks of plant life;
they are the jelly-fishes and sea-squirts, as it were,
of the vegetable world, and have a complicated
reproductive method, of which the spore-bearing
stage is but a part.

Flowers and Lnsects. a7

The flowering plant corresponds to the higher
animals; its reproductive material is enclosed
and cherished; its seeds and sperm-cells develop
under delicate protecting wrappings, and are not
exposed as are the unprotected fern-spores,

And all this care of the seeds and forming of
them, is accomplished in the cleverest way by the
plant, no distinctly new tissues being elaborated
for this important office.

It was Goethe, the poet, who first established
the flower-leaf identity, and now every one knows
the beautiful and poetic truth that flowers are only
modified — why not say glorified ? — leaves.

Nature has a way of her own of economizing
material, and has exercised a delightful ingenuity
in the uses to which she has put her leaves, some-
times compressing them into thorns or scales, again
expanding them into petals, or rolling them into
pistils and stamens.

Originally composed of but stem and leaf, the
plant successfully achieves all of its wonderful
organs from the manipulation of these two primi-
tive parts.

Rising through rank upon rank of green leaves
the. lily ends in a burst of poetry. The green
leaves are transformed by love, —the pupa be-
comes the imago.

Instead of continuing to produce scattered leaves
along a lengthening stalk, the leaf material is con-
gregated together in close ranks, some spirit of

78 Life and Love.

beauty rests upon it and refines and glorifies, so
there unfolds in splendor the broad banners of
snowy white, of glowing gold or crimson.

Nor is this all,—nor the prime cause of the
transformation.

The gorgeous wings of this imago are but the
outbreak of the love that animates it, and sur-
rounded and protected by the shining robe are
other leaves yet more curiously modified, and on
whose account all this beauty exists.

Standing within the bright petals are yet more
delicate leaf transformations; these are the stamens
composed of filaments, tipped with anthers,
—each anther a tiny box, as though the
blade of a very little leaf had been rolled in
at its edges and fastened there. And this
box, this anther, contains the pollen or
“dust” of the flowers, which one suspects
to be matter of importance, placed thus in
the heart of the flower, and formed thus
centrally from metamorphosed leaves. The
suspicion is well founded, for in this dust we
recognize the “sperm” of the plant, — these
tiny pollen grains being the small male cells.
True to their kind, they are small, active,
{J variously shaped in different plants, — and
‘true to their nature, they have not power

to develop alone.
They contain, as we may say, but half the power
of life. The other half is safely folded within yet

Flowers and Insects. 79

another set of metamorphosed leaves. Look again
in the heart of the lily.

Here we see a central column, firm, strong, and
large, as compared with the delicate stamens. This
column is formed of altered leaves, folded-in in
such way as to convert its swollen base into
a number of closed chambers; and as the
pollen was budded from the inner part of
the transformed anther-leaf, and the spores
from the surface of the fern-leaf, so are the
little ovules or seedlets, as shown in the A
diagram, which represents a cross-section of
the ovary, budded from the inner side of these
curled-up ovary leaves.

Yes, this closed chamber is the ovary.

In it lie the seed-cells, or, as they truly are, the
egg-cells, unable without assistance to develop into
a new plant. It is but the story of life told over
again.

The pollen ripens, the anthers open to let it es-
cape, and it falls upon the stigma, or broad upper
end of the column leading to the ovary. This
column is practically hollow, and through it the
pollen grain reaches down to bestow its life-insuring
touch upon the ovule. Falling upon the stigma, the
pollen grain, absorbing speedily the nutriment
about it, grows rapidly, reaching down a slender,
finger-like tube, which finds its way straight to the
opening in the ovary, and powerfully attracted by
the waiting ovules, joins one of them, transferring

80 Life and Love.

its tiny atom of protoplasm to the contents of the
ovule, just as the protoplasmic material of the
sperm-cell joined, and was fused with, the egg-cell.

Life is all one. There is no great difference be-
tween an animal and a plant, — merely a difference
of degree, rather than of kind. Springing from
the same source, one form of life moves rhythmi-
cally on for but a short distance, then reaches the
end of its ancestral path, — another moves yet far-
ther along a more difficult way; yet are they
brothers all, and inextricably joined the one to the
other along the whole line of life.

Animal could not live without plant, plant
could not live without animal. The carbonic acid
gas exhaled by all animal life forms necessary food
for the plant, and this carbonic acid gas, were it not
appropriated and cleared from the air, would suffo-
cate the animal in the product of its own activity.
At the same time the animal depends upon the
plant to liberate oxygen for his consumption.

But nowhere are plant life and animal life more
curiously and intimately connected than among
insects and flowers.

The same laws that govern animal reproduction
govern plant life.

When the period of fertility approaches we find
the plant tissues undergoing a change; certain of
them burst forth in rare bloom, and this gorgeous
coloring, we are told, is developed to such intensity
because of the love of insects for bright colors,

Flowers and Insects. 81

The flower is the result of changed leaves, — the
changes which thus tranform the hard green leaf to
the delicate white or pink or blue petal, recalling
the phenomenal reproductive changes in the ani-
mal life.

The initial power to change resides in the plant
or animal. When, through this tendency to vary,
a new form of life arises, the conditions into which
it is finally born determine whether it shall survive
or perish. For instance, suppose a certain kind of
insect be born sometimes green in color, some-
times brown. Suppose too, that these insects live
upon green leaves, and are agreeable to the taste
of certain birds. The brown insects would be
more quickly detected and would be eaten, the
green ones surviving to reproduce their kind, and
hand down as an inheritance the tendency to be
green. Thus, in time, there might arise a race of
insects always green. Thus the conditions under
which they lived would determine the color of the
race.

In the same way any variation in the animal or
plant which better adapts it to the world into
which it is born, through inheritance tends to be-
come fixed; and any variation which puts the
living thing at a disadvantage to its surroundings is
quickly eliminated by the death without offspring
of the form so unfortunately endowed. In time of
hardship the cattle or deer best able to obtain food
and to resist cold, through superior intelligence, or

6

82 Lyfe and Love.

hardihood, or better developed hoofs or horns, or
some advantage in size or shape or coloring, sur-
vive to hand down these characteristics to their
descendants.

Thus the animal is to an extent dependent upon
its surroundings for its form, — those best adapted
to their surroundings crowding out of the life strug-
gle those less well adapted This is what Darwin
calls natural’ selection, and Huxley the survival of
the fittest, and is as operative in plants as in ani-
mals. Any development of plant life which better
enables it to live and get nourishment gives it an
advantage over its less well endowed companions,
so that its seeds are more likely to mature and
grow.

The initial power to change, then, resides in the
plant;.this power to vary expressing itself in many
ways, natural selection finally determines which of
the forms shall become permanent, — and natural
selection in this case is often insect selection.

In order to understand this, let us recall the fact
that too close relationship between reproducing
individuals is no more desirable for many plants
than for animals, and in the course of ages many
flowers have become 30 formed or modified as to
render self-fertilization impossible. The flower has
evolved the most curious and ingenious devices
imaginable to this end,

Sometimes stamens and pistil mature at different
times, so that when one is ripe the other is not,

Flowers and Insects. 83

and there can be no fertilization of one by the
other, or else one has already passed its period of
fertility and is no longer active.

Again, stamens and pistil are sometimes so
related to each other that the pollen cannot reach
the stigma unaided.

Oftentimes, too, the pollen is inoperative in its
own flower, even acting as a blight.

Sometimes the pistil curves away from the sta-
mens, sometimes, it shuts itself up in a little box of
petals and refuses to look forth and receive the gift
of pollen from its own stamens,

What madness is this on the part of the
flowers?

The pollen cannot, as a rule, like the sperm-cells
of the fish, float about until it find its companion-
life. Although ready enough to grow down into
the ovary when once it finds lodgment upon the
stigma, the pollen has no wings to bear it from
flower to flower, no legs to enable it to search for
its companion-life — then what does this refusal on
the part of the flowers mean?

Ah, but the pollen as wings, and there is in the
flower a confidence born of long ancestral experi-
ence that these wings will appear in time and bear
its pollen to waiting ovules, as well as bring to it
fresh pollen from neighboring plants. The wings
are those of the insects. Long ages of this sort of
interchange have formed flowers dependent upon
insects for fertilization. The bee enters a blossom

84 Life and Love.

whose anthers are ripe but whose pistil is trustingly
immature, -— not desiring its own pollen, and not
fearing failure if it decline to receive it. Probing
deep for sweets the bee plentifully dusts her hairy
form with countless pollen grains and flies to
another flower of the same species for increase of
honey store, and there, it may be, comes upon a
blossom whose stigma is ready, but whose anthers
are not, and in again searching for sweets transfers
pollen grains to the ready pistil.

As many insects visit each flower every day, and
as the insect generally gocs from one flower to
another of the same kind when convenient, appar-
‘ently not liking to mix sweets, it follows that all
the flowers have ample opportunity to get pollen
from another plant when the time comes.

Some flowers have such faith in their winged
friends that they have taken forms which make fer-
tilization, except by certain insects, impossible.

Some orchids prefer moths as bearers of their
love messages, and we are told that only by the
eyes of the moth, as it thrusts its head into the
flower-cup, can the pollen, adhering in long adhe-
sive masses, be conveyed from these to neighbor-
ing orchid flowers. The red clover closes heart
and petals to all but the bumble-bee. She alone
can gather red-clover sweets and carry pollen to its
ovules.

Fascinating as any romance is the story of the
loves of the flowers and their marvellous devices

Flowers and Insects. 85

for alluring certain kinds of insects and elect-
ing them as bearers of love messages to other
flowers.

Fascinating too is the story of the creation of
flower-forms by insects.

We are told by one whose life was devoted to
reading nature’s story that the flower whose color,
whose odor, whose nectar attract is constantly
visited by winged creatures whose presence results
in the sure transference of pollen to waiting stig-
mas, and consequently there results maturing of
seed and assurance of the continued existence of
the plant; while another flower whose activity ex-
presses itself in form or odor or color or nectar not
attractive to the winged world must wait in vain for
rejuvenescence and die at last unable to perfect
seed for the continuance of its life.

Some insects are attracted by bright colors,
some by odors. Hence those flowers having the
brightest petals to guide the winged epicure to the
honey it loves would receive most visits, would be
well fertilized in consequence, and would have a
better chance to mature hardy seed, and so hand
on the color inheritance, than would less brilliant
flowers.

Flowers exhaling the most powerful perfume
frequently attract night-flying insects, and the color
most readily seen at night probably being white, it
is believed that the whitest and most highly per-
fumed flowers have been most favored by pollen-

86 Life and Love.

bearing guests, and so have tended to displace less
well-endowed flowers.

Since color is enough to guide the insect in the
daylight, it often happens that the most brilliant
flowers are scentless. Honey and color being
necessary to attract the bee, the flowers containing
those two properties were doubtless most fre-
quently visited, the less bright or less well supplied
with honey being overlooked and left unfertilized
or obliged to resort to self-fertilization, which,
resulting in feebler seeds, gave the advantage to
the insect-fertilized flowers.

White flowers, on the other hand, are quite uni-
versally fragrant — for obvious reasons.

Any peculiarity of form or structure which could
give the flower an advantage in being fertilized
would result in the development of its seeds at the
expense of the less hardy seeds of less fortunately
constituted plants, and so in time there might arise,
as undoubtedly there have arisen, many wonderful
and beautiful flower-forms.

Insects, then, have been instrumental in produc-
ing color, odor, and form in flowers, and are neces-
sary to the existence of many forms of plant life.

The hum of countless insects about the blossom-
ing fruit-trec is not only a soothing and delicate
sound in itself, but conveys a pleasing sense of
security concerning another season when masses
of bloom shall be succeeded by a rich harvest of
fruit.

Flowers and Insects. 87

That bees and butterflies love the same colors
and odors that man loves is one of the beautiful

harmonies of nature; through
this refined taste in the world
that moves on gossamer wings
has come to man much of the
great beauty of the flower world
and its intoxicating odors.

Inextricably and beautifully
is all life intermingled.

Insect and flower, —- one in
beauty and in nature; each con-
tributing to the happiness and
the fulness of life of the other,
and to the fulness and life of
man.

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Life and Love.

X.

PLANT LIFE.

ECESSARILY there is a great waste of re-
productive material among the plants, par-

ticularly of the pollen, and this
again recalls certain curious facts
of the lower animal life. Much
pollen is entirely lost, as it prob-
ably takes but one pollen grain
to fertilize each ovule ; but a
million grains may not be too
many to make certain the finding
of the ovule by one. The insect
is a sure messenger where there
is abundance of material; sooner
or later the result of fertilization
will be accomplished by it, but
it might happen that many visits
would be made before pollen was
successfully transferred to waiting
stigma.

The bee, for instance, not only
fails sometimes to hurry from
one plant to another of the same
kind, but is not consciously work-
ing for the plant at all. Her con-

Plant Life. 89

cern is herself; she desires honey for her own use,
and also puts the pollen to a use not at all
designed by the flower; she stores it away in the
form of ‘bee-bread” as food for herself.

But the plant can well afford a generous largess
of even the precious reproductive material to those
active winged helpers, and as a rule the number
of pollen grains produced by a single flower is
something almost inconceivable.

They, like other sperm-cells, are very small,
sometimes microscopic in size, and oftentimes of
very beautiful and remarkable forms. To be able
to look into the world which the microscope reveals
is like being endowed with a new and finer exist-
ence, it so enlarges one’s mental horizon.

Some plants are so prodigal of pollen that they
do not depend upon insects as pollen carriers,
but by an astounding fertil’ty fill the air with
this precious ‘‘dust,” so that it is literally borne
upon the wings of the wind from one flower to
another. Certain trees have this habit and the
number of pollen grains they consign to the trans-
portation of the wind is beyond man’s power of
comprehension.

Sometimes for miles clouds of pollen will be
carried, covering the ponds with a light film and
filling the air. Sometimes this pollen dust is caught
in a storm and carried into upper air-currents,
where it is borne along over vast distances, finally
falling ina cloud over a distant region, sometimes

go Life and Love.

producing curious effects known as “ yellow days”
* or “red days.”

Fortunately, the presence of the wrong pollen
has no effect upon the flower ; otherwise the stray
grains from all sorts of plants borne by wind and
insect would produce such confusion in the vege-
table world by fertilizing lilies with roses, or pop-
pies with morning-glories, that nothing would be
able to keep its own form. Nearly related plants
can sometimes fertilize one another, however, and
if the farmer wants good melons he must be care-
ful not to let pumpkins or cucumbers grow near
the melon-patch; otherwise the busy bees going
from pumpkin to melon may fertilize the melon
with pumpkin pollen and the result be a sort of
pumpkin-melon not at all agreeable to the taste.

As is the case with some insects, the plant often
grows and stores up nutriment for a time, finally to
expend the whole stock so accumulated in one vast
effort of reproduction.

Plants with succulent roots, as radishes, turnips,
carrots, and beets have this habit. Sometimes one
whole growing season is devoted to storing up a
great root full of starch and other foods; then
winter comes, and the plant dies above ground,
but lives below. Next season the beet or turnip
sends up leaves and flower-stalk with remarkable
speed. The growth is luxurious and prodigious,
and abundant bloom is followed by the maturing
of many seeds.

Plant Life. gl

Look now at the root under ground; it is. no
longer plump and full of nutriment, it is shrivelled,
tough, and fibrous, no longer fit food for man; its
great store of nutriment has been consumed by its
effort at reproduction. It reminds us of the pupa,
lying inert and full of nutriment, only to trans-
form its accumulated store of food into the beauti-
ful imago.

Like the butterfly, the plant reaches its imago
state ; it blossoms, bears seed, and dies.

The sisal hemp spends ten years elaborating
leaves of great size and thickness, until it resem-
bles a monster century-plant; then, forsooth, out
springs a great flower-stalk from its very heart;
this flower-stalk, as thick as a man’s arm and
twenty feet high, topped with a great crown of
bloom, grows in the incredible time of six months!
As might be expected, this mighty effort is fol-
lowed by the death of the plant.

If prevented from blossoming it will continue
to grow, and may reach prodigious size. This,
too, is true of other plants.

Prevent the reproductive consummation, and the
plant, instead of running its little cycle of growth,
reproduction, death, will live on.

Saved from the tremendous changes and_ loss
which accompany the reproductive function even
in plants, they continue to perform their vegetative
acts for a longer period.

_Fruit-trees which bear too young exhaust them-

92 Life and Love.

selves and fail to make a satisfactory growth of
wood; so the careful gardener removes the flower
buds from his young trees.

The great majority of plants have a_ short
period of growth, followed by reproduction and
death.

This is not true of all, however; some, like the
higher animals, having recurring seasons of repro-
ductive activity, followed by rest, instead of ex-
pending all in one great effort.

Some, as has been seen, grow for several seasons
in preparation for one glorious outburst of love
and beauty, after which their race is run.

To the short-lived plants belong many of the
garden flowers. They come from the seed in the
spring, and in the fall fade never to revive, — their
life preserved in the seed they perfect.

The wild flowers that make the woods dear to
us in the spring are exquisite love-songs, and only
that. The hepatica, the spring beauty, the dainty
dicentra, are Nature’s glad tribute to the great love
that alone keeps the earth sweet and desirable.
They blossom in an hour as it were. Underground
live stout roots and compact bulbs, reservoirs of
nutriment, to enable the delicate stems and leaves
to go forth and blossom and scatter seed for other
beautiful spring-times.

If it were not for love there would be no flowers.
If it were not for love there would be no beauty on
the earth.

Plant Life. 93

The trees take life less tragically than do most
of the garden flowers, They grow at their leisure,
and after years of careful preparation bloom with
temperance, and unexhausted live on to repeat
each year their anthem of love.

The peach-tree, growing rapidly and hastening
into rapturous outbreak of ecstatic pink, pays the
penalty of too great ardor by soon closing its
career.

The apple-tree, less vehement, grows more leis-
urely and waits longer for the consummation of
love to express itself in a fragrant mantle of bloom,
and consequently has a longer lease of life; while
the orange-tree, yet more discreet, lingers in pre-
paration for eight or even ten years, then applies
itself to the creation of fragrance and beauty for a
correspondingly great length of time, increasing in
power each year.

Early maturity thus seems, even in the plant
world, to be connected with early death.

The blossoming of a plant is always an expres-
sion of its desire to reproduce itself.

The flower is the symbol of love; within it is
somewhere concealed the ovary with its burden
of waiting life, or the stamen with its burden of
eager life.

Often one flower contains both ovary and
stamens, though very frequently this is not the
case. As in the animal life, the ovary is somc-
times in one individual, the fertilizing material in

94 Life and Love.

another; in this case the continuance of life in the
plant is entirely dependent upon the kindly office
of wind or insect.

Even where both kinds of reproductive material
are in one flower, as has been seen, their union is
not desirable, and precautions are often taken to
prevent it.

The mountain laurel has its immature stamens
bent over like springs, the anthers concealed in
little pockets along the inner side of its white cup.
The breeze, the wing of a bird, the jostle of a pass-
ing creature stirs the laurel-bush, and out fly these
delicate springs, throwing the pollen with force
enough to land it quite to the other side of the
bush, or upon a neighboring bush. Of course this
is precarious, for it may not land upon a flower at
all; still, with these assaults of pollen continually
going on through many summer days, each flower
will have a chance sooner or later to secure the
prize. One cannot doubt this when observing
the seed pods that later weigh down the laurel-
bushes.

The fruit, so agreeable to the palate of man and
to the birds, is but a development of the ovary or
some related part, and is not the first thought of
the plant. The apple exists, not for the pulp,
juicy and delectable to man, but for the black little
seeds concealed within the pulp.

The delicious envelope of the plum, peach, pear,
apricot, are but invitations to the sister life in the

Plant Life. 95

animal world to eat and convey away unharmed
the seed within, to new fields for its develop-
ment.

The berries entice that good may come to
them.

The tiny seeds though swallowed will not digest,
they are but carried to other places, where they
may chance upon suitable soil for growth.

“Eat this sweet pulp and cast away my seed
into new and fertile soil,” the apple seems to say,
while the burr, the beggar’s lice, the stick-tight,
cover their dear seeds with hooked mantles that
cling fast to passers-by, and thus scatter the seed
over new fields.

What applies to the animal life, in a general
way applies to the plant.

Prevent the loss of the reproductive material,
and life can be prolonged; to an extent even the
evanescent flower can be preserved by preventing
it from fulfilling its desire.

Remove the anthers before they open from the
tall white lily, and the regal flower will not fade so
soon by several hours. Its activity is arrested, it
does not precipitate its whole life upon the perfect-
ing of seed, —it waits. Finally it fades, slowly
and lingeringly, as loath to leave unaccomplished
that high end for which it unfolded its beautiful
form.

Its glorious vestment, like the wings of the but-
terfly, adorn it only for the season of love; the

96 Life and Love.

high office of love once fulfilled, the petals fade and
fall, the empty stamens too fall away, and there is
left of the flowers only the ovary to go on growing
until the seeds are perfected.

Since petals and stamens and pistils are but
transformed leaves, one is not surprised to find all
stages of transformation observable in some flowers.
In the water-lily can often be seen all stages of
stamen forming, from the perfect anther with its
filament, to the petal tipped with a half-formed
anther. All double flowers are so at the expense
of the essential organs, as stamens and pistil very
justly are called. An extra row of petals means
one row the less of stamens. A double rose some-
times has all the stamens and even the pistils con-
verted into petals. As a rule, double flowers are
the result of cultivation, the plant depending upon
man for such care that it shall be preserved, and
not troubling to form the reproductive cells and
enclose them in protecting walls.

The tall, spotted lily, however, so familiar in old
gardens, cannot trust its reproduction wholly to
seeds, but in the angle of each leaf gives off little
round black bulbs which are tiny reproductions of
the parent plant.

These little bulbs, reminding us of the sprouting
of those worms that do not wait for the egg-
development, fall off, and in time may grow, having
impressed upon them in some mysterious way the
whole personality of the parent plant.

Plant Life. 97

Thus again we see how reproduction is every-
where the same, but a budding off of a portion of
the parent, which under suitable conditions may
develop into another being like the parent.

98 Life and Love.

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BIRD LIFE.

_— the life ascends, — that is, grows more com-
plex, — the creature is less prodigal of the
f&% reproductive material.

The demands made upon the high-
er and more complex orders are so
varied, so great and costly, that the
tremendous fecundity of the lower life
cannot be maintained; so in these the germ-
cells are less exposed to the possibility of
destruction,

A bird which lays but a dozen eggs in a
season cannot exhibit the stupendous indiffer-
ence to results that characterizes the fish
which lays a million or more.

The love-life of the bird is very active,
however; it is an intermittent condition in-
stead of a single cataclysm, and so, cul-
minating less exhaustively, continues for a
longer period.

As the breeding season approaches, the
male bird gives evidence of the great-

~~ est exuberance of vitality. He often

Bird Life. 99

fights in a desperate manner, he yet more fre-
quently sings out his emotion, and his plumage
appears more alive than at other times.

The feathers are glossier and take on a new iri-
descence, even among the black or brown varieties.

The female, usually quiet in coloring, assumes a
glossier appearance at this time.

The young birds, male and female, resemble the
mother instead of the father in the color of their
plumage. But as the young male approaches
maturity, as the life-germs develop toward com-
pletion, a change comes over him.

The vitality that accompanies the unfolding of
these marvellous germs of life thrills through his
whole body. His form quivers with a, to him,
hitherto unknown emotion. If he be an oriole,
behold the glory of orange and gold that burns in
his feathers !

If a bird of paradise, he comes forth in long and
brilliant plumes, like some Strange flower suddenly
blossoming in magnificence. The peacock spreads
a fan gorgeous to behold. The scarlet tanager
appears like a flame among the bushes.

Here is a bird as blue as the sky, there one the
color of gold. Here again appears one wearing
great spurs as a badge of his masculinity; wattles
adorn him, and a comb red and haughty.

Tufts of feathers, graceful aigrets, and long
plumes are the badges of many others.

In strange forms and stranger colors does this

100 Life and Love.

exuberant life of the male cxpress itself, and at
each recurring season of love these badges of love
and life are renewed.

Sometimes they but brighten, again they grow
anew each season, disappearing when the brief
turmoil is over.

And what care for the precious life-germs is
shown in the history of the birds! Here is no
lavish expenditure, no pouring out of the principle
of life to meet its fate exposed and disregarded.

The bird’s ovaries are small, and placed deep in
‘the innermost recesses of the body. There are
two of them, one on either side, though as a rule
only the one lying on the left side develops; so it
seems in the adult bird as though there were but
one ovary.

In this ovary the tiny egg-cells, no larger than
pin-heads, form. A long tube, or oviduct, con-
nects the ovary with the lower end of the intestine,
whence it opens into the outer world.

Like the ovaries of the female, the sperm-sacs of
the male are small and deep-hidden and have their
outlet.

While still in the ovary the tiny egg-cell, as it
ripens, absorbs a large quantity of food, so that it
assumes in the hen’s egg a size of about an inch in
diameter, forming what we know as the yolk of the
egg. When it has reached its full size the egg-cell
breaks away from its containing membrane and
begins its journey down the oviduct.

Bird Life. IOI

In the diagram are shown a number of eggs of
different sizes in the ovary, a being one ready to
start upon its course to the outer world.
Sometimes in the ovary, sometimes
after it has entered the oviduct, the egg-
cell meets the sperm-cell, which has
travelled all this way to meet it.

For this egg is not to suffer chance /
of destruction, like the egg of the fish |
that, rolled about by the waves, may
miss the indispensable union with the
sperm-cell.

On the contrary, the bird employs the
method of the insect to solve this diffi-
culty, and the sperm is deposited by the
male within the duct of the female.
It is true the bird has no complica-
ted intromittent organ as has the in-
sect, yet there is sufficient modification
of structure at the outer end of the tube
through which the fertilizing fluid is to
pass to permit the desired result, and sperm and
egg-cell meet before the latter has entered the
world.

In this asylum, safe from harm, the sperm-cell
seeks the egg-cell, often travelling as far as the
ovary itself to find it, when it enters and is com-
bined with it.

The now fertilized egg-cell moves along the
oviduct, whose walls secrete for it a quantity of

102 Life and Love.

albumen, which we know as the “white” of the
egg. As it moves along, the muscles of the ovi-
duct give it a spiral motion, and thus turning
around and around it becomes coated with the
elongated “ white,” or albumen; 6 in the diagram
marks the part of the oviduct where it receives the
albumen.

Next it enters the part ¢ where the lining of the
oviduct secretes a limy substance which forms
about it a wall, familiar to all as the egg-shell.

Thus nourished and protected, the egg is laid, a
hard, firm, resisting, vaulted chamber, whose form
no architect could strengthen, so well are its arches
planned to sustain weight and resist pressure.

The egg is laid, but the labor of love is not
ended. Inthe bird, sex-life is but part of its repro-
ductive history; parental love wakens to cherish
these helpless imprisoned beings.

Oftentimes both parents feel an irresistible unde-
fined attraction for the life to emerge from those
marble walls. They look upon its prison and
know that their offspring cannot yet come to per-
fection without their loving aid. So upon the hard
eggs the parents sit, relieving each other; or,
where this is not the case, the mother devotes her-
self unsparingly to forward the interests of the
future life contained in them.

A stupendous task it is, and a cruel one, this
compulsory, wearisome sitting upon the insensate
eggs, by a creature to whom motion is joy itself.

Lira Life. 103

Yet this, one or both parents joyfully do. More
than this, some strange sympathetic knowledge of
what is about to ensue causes them in most
cases to prepare a home for the young before the
eggs are laid. Skilfully they weave their cunning
nests, and artfully hide them in grass or bush,
swing them from the twigs of trees, or firmly
plant them in their crotches.

Nor is their duty ended when the young come
forth; then the cramped and tired parents stretch
their wings, indeed, for these help-
less ones must be fed. All day long
they fly abroad, bringing home dainty
morsels, scarcely stopping to satisfy
their own hunger, so urgent is the
appeal of those hungry little ones.

Now the plumage of the parents fades again, the
male sings less exaltedly, the great quickening
season of sex-life is over. The magic power that
drew one to the other is in abeyance; each has ful-
filled this phase of its destiny; the one has laid the
eggs, the other contributed to their development.

The first ardor of the love season having passed,
in its place comes this new sympathy which makes
them labor for the fruit of their great love, which
holds them together in mutual work and weariness,
and mutual love and joy in their treasures.

It is the dawning of a higher life. Parental love
is an early and potent form of unselfishness.

Besides the instinct of nest-building and the

104 Life and Love.

feeling of parental love, the bird is subject, as has
been seen, to many physical changes during the
period of reproductive activity. Not only does it
express its new activity in color and song; other
curious changes sometimes occur, as, for instance,
where in certain swallow-like birds the saliva-cells
enormously develop and there is exuded a sticky
substance which is made into nests for the young,
reminding us of the .strange glue by which the
lobster holds her treasures to herself.

These nests, alas, are sweet to the palate of their
human neighbor the Chinaman, and many a poor
bird’s labor ends in a too costly soup for his orien-
tal highness.

Doves and some other birds during the breeding
season produce a substance in the crop which
softens the food and turns it to a thick, milky
paste; this is regurgitated and fed to the young.

One old parrot, who was destined to drag out a
miserable existence in the zodlogical garden of a
Northern city, relieved his overcharged parental
feelings by achieving this result and feeding a
similar food to his companions in bondage!

The bird loses but a comparatively small amount
of reproductive material; it cares for its offspring
both before and after their development, necessitat-
ing but comparatively little waste of material, and
we find it less exhausted by the function of repro-
duction than are many of the fishes.

In it the power of life is not immediately lost;

Bird Life. 105

again and again will it waken to renewal as the
earth breaks out in its spring-tide of new life;
again and again will the birds hear the ecstatic
sounds of love ring through nature’s courts, and
feel the thrill of life and love in their own hearts.

106

Life and Love.

XII.

SKIN CHANGES.

N young animals the male and female are as a

rule very similar to each other in appearance

and disposition. But as they near
maturity a change takes place, and
they begin to diverge from each
other, the male acquiring peculiarly
masculine, the female peculiarly fem-
inine characteristics. The maturing
of the reproductive cells is in some
deep way connected with profound
changes in the whole being, and
these changes affect the two sexes
differently.

All the tissues of the body respond
in a remarkable manner to the activ-
ity at the reproductive centres. Thus,
at reproductive maturity, the female,
yielding as it were, to the influence
of the developing egg-cell, has the

characteristics of femininity stamped upon every

tissue.

In her whole physical organization, and,

as a consequence, in her mental and emotional
nature, she becomes distinctly feminine.

Skin Changes. 107

The character of the quiescent, well-nourished,
large egg-cell in some way becomes impressed
upon the whole structure, and there arises the
large, comparatively quiescent, well-nourished
female.

The reproductive activity of the male, on the
other hand, being primarily that of the intensely
active, less well-nourished, small sperm-cell, the
tissues are harmoniously affected by this all-per-
vading activity, and the result is a distinctly mascu-
line individual, small, variable, and active.

In the lower life, where there is in every direc-
tion less complexity, less variability, these charac-
teristics of male and female are marked.

The female is large, quiescent, stable, and well-
nourished; the male small, active, variable, and ill-
nourished.

In the higher life these fundamental sex distinc-
tions also exist, though often more or less mod-
ified and obscured.

The whole body of the creature, as we have seen,
is profoundly modified by the fundamental, com-
pelling force of reproduction.

Deep and significant changes occur at the
time of reproductive maturity. The male be-
comes stamped ineffaceably by the subtle, con-
cealed forces of sex working within him. The
female, too, yields to a mysterious power, acting
deep within the cells, and claiming her in the name
of her sex.

108 Life and Love.

In the fishes we usually find the adult female
larger and fuller than the male; this is also the
case with insects and with many birds, as well as
with other forms of life) Among mammals the
adult male is generally the larger, this probably
being due to secondary causes, which have oper-
ated to produce a more powerful male, that being
the form best suited to the circumstances in which
the animal lived.

Everywhere in life, from lowest to highest, the
male tends to vary more than the female.

And as a rule the male is everywhere more
active than the female.

Of course there are individuals which afford ap-
parent exceptions to any rule, and there are indi-
vidual females more active than individual males;
but, taken as a class, the propositions laid down are
true, and though one female may be more active
than a certain male, she probably is not as active
as the most active male of her species.

It is never safe to draw illustrations from the
comparison of individuals, as life is so complex
and so varied that truth apparently exists in all
degrees of completeness, and can only be arrived
at by much careful examination.

As maturity approaches, the most obvious
changes are often those that take place in the skin
and its appendages; and although the skin shows
great power of variation in both sexes, it usually
varies most markedly in the male. The powerful

Skin Changes. 109

and often destructive activity of the reproductive
centres finds sympathetic expression in the cells of
the skin, and there, too, is a powerful, and some-
times destructive, activity observable.

Scales, feathers, hair, nails, claws, teeth, horns,
hoofs, and nearly if not all excretory glands, such
as the perspiratory and sebaceous, are outgrowths
of the skin. Hence, in them we find marked
changes, often riotous growths expressing their
superabundant vitality.

Bearing in mind the tendency of the skin to
change, it is not difficult to understand the increased
brilliancy of color which is a general characteristic
of the breeding season.

In certain species of fish the skin undergoes
changes which cause it to glow with quite re-
markable splendor, some acquiring a livery vying
in brilliancy with that worn by the butterflies
and beetles.

The bare places or callosities on the baboon clow
with brilliant colors during reproductive activity.

The feathers of birds, being direct outgrowths
of the skin, at the breeding season, grow more
alive-looking, glossier and brighter. The male
bird, his cells being perhaps always more active
than those of the female, assumes a_ brighter
garb than she wears, unless some special cause
steps in to render it otherwise.

In many forms of life, color changes herald the
advent of the reproductive period.

1IO Life and Love.

Skin growths of an abnormal nature are frequent
in some animals. In certain crustaceans, as we
have seen, the skin is modified to such an extent
that the female uses it as a nursery for her young.

In the Surinam toad, the eggs having been
placed by the male upon the back of the female,
the skin grows up about them, entirely covering
them and so affording safe asylum for their devel-
opment. Certain animals possess pouches which
are a result of this excessive skin growth, and
which they use to rear their young.

Although the skin of the female is often greatly
modified at the reproductive season, and these
modifications have been taken advantage of and
developed by use to serve as aids in the rearing of
offspring, the male is on the whole most markedly
affected by skin outgrowths.

Nearly all male birds have excessive feather
developments; long tail-feathers, crests, plumes,
long wing-feathers are common, and sometimes the
bird is so cumbered with finery as to be a burden
to himself. Japan, for instance, rejoices in a cock
whose tail-feathers are many times longer than his
body.

These feather growths and the bright colors,
originating doubtless in the extra male activity,
and then developed, it may be, through inheritance
by the discerning love of beauty shown by the
female in her choice of a mate, have given to the
world the varied beauty of the birds.

Skin Changes. Ill

Not only in feathers, however, does the bird
express his masculine activity. He sometimes
wears a stately comb and gorgeous wattles, and his
legs are armed with martial spurs, which he has no
doubt encouraged to their formidable proportions
by the exercise of another masculine character-
istic, the desire to kick out of the way his
rivals.

In some species the bird wears his livery all the
time; in others, however, the finest plumes appear
as a special ornament at the season of love, and the
discreet female is said to select the knight of the
gayest attire as the father of future generations,
thus developing and preserving beauty on the
earth.

Dewlaps in cattle, skin folds and excrescences
in other mammals, illustrate abnormal skin-growths
in the higher animals.

Among insects, the ovipositor, with its formidable
armory of saw, file, auger, sting, the complicated
intromittent organ, are skin outgrowths, and are
generally the product of the imago or sexually
mature condition.

Even the wings of insects are a result of the
power to vary displayed by the skin, for from skin
folds come forth these brilliant gossamers.

Feathers, scales, spines, hair, are closely related
outgrowths of the skin, and many males express
their masculine vitality in unusual growths of hair
at the time of reproductive maturity. The male

tie Life and Love.

buffalo is buried in a mass of hair about the
shoulders and face; the lion develops his royal
mane; beards and other growths about the face
and head are a common expression of the skin
activity in the mature male.

Horns too, being a skin development, are sub-
ject to great variations. Certain deer develop
large horns with astonishing rapidity at the repro-
ductive season, these horns being apparently but
an expression of the intense vitality seeking means
of escape, for, the love-season over, these great
antlers drop off!

In other creatures the horns are permanent,
but do not develop until the period of reproduc-
tive maturity approaches, when the horns of the
male show ercater power of growth than do those
of the female; in some species, as in certain sheep
and deer, the female is devoid of horns, only the
male indulging in this distinctly masculine outburst
of skin tissue.

The teeth being devclopments of the skin, it is
not surprising to find cxcessive activity here dis-
played by some creatures.

The wild boar indulges in one or even two
pairs of murderous tusks, which he finds very
convenient in disposing of enemies, and which he
does not fail to develop by exercise.

The elephant, walrus, and seal express their
masculinity in the growth of the beautiful ivories
which man covets.

Skin Changes. tis

Male horses often have extra teeth, which so
far from being a boon, often afford much distress,
unless man comes to the rescue and extracts them.

The tusks of the male gorilla, we are told, are
in size nearly double those of the female.

The skin glands at the reproductive period par-
take of the general skin activity, and there are even
excreted fluids at that time which occur at no other
times. In the lobster, as we remember, a sticky
substance exudes from the skin of the under side
of the body of the female, which she uses to glue
the eggs in place, while other crustaceans exude a
fluid which serves as food forthe young. In some
animals the perspiration undergoes a change, ac-
quiring a peculiar and characteristic odor. In
some, special glands secrete a substance possessing
a powerful odor, by which one sex can be notified
of the presence of the other, The alligator, for
instance, has two musk-bags under the lower jaw,
which, during the breeding season, give a strong
musky odor to the haunts of the creature.

Certain insects at times emit a powerful odor
from the skin; while, strangest of all, the best
accredited scientists tell us that the milk of mam-
mals is secreted by glands which are skin develop-
ments.

There are other than skin changes evident in
some creatures at the reproductive period; the
stickleback, for instance, secretes a sticky sub-
stance from the kidneys, and this it uses in weav-

8

114 Life and Love.

ing a nest for its eggs; while certain cells in the
lining membrane of the crop in some birds disinte-
grate and form with the food a milky substance
which is regurgitated and fed to the young.

The emotional power of the creature is also
greatly affected by the physical exhilaration of the
love season. The bird fairly overflows with joy
and life, and this happiness it expresses by bursts
of song. It sings from very love of love. The
more active male here too shows his excess of
vitality, for his song far surpasses that of his part-
ner, though she cannot refrain from also singing
her song of jubilee. Perhaps she best shows her
appreciation by yielding her heart to that gay little
cavalier who renders the finest music, thus insuring
to the world sweet sound as well as bright color.

Not only in song and happiness, however, is the
superactivity of the love season expressed. Some-
times the exact opposite is the case, and there
arises a vehement desire to fight and quarrel.

Even birds sometimes indulge in very unseemly
behavior towards each other at this time.

Among mammals a fierce disposition is not un-
common in the adult male. And among nearly
all male animals the cruel and sclfish emotion of
jealousy is easily aroused during the breeding
season.

This darker side is only one out of many ways
in which the activity of the love season expresses
itself, and in the history of the race this individual

Skin Changes. 115

selfishness is not only advantageous, but perhaps
has been necessary to the continuance of the race.
Creatures capable of feeling at all have a sort of
spiritual as well as physical rejuvenescence at this
season, for reproduction is a wuzversal fact. It isan
essential part of the activity of every living being,
and in all its manifestations claims the supremacy
of universality. It is not a local expression, even
in the individual. It reaches to the
centre of existence, and affects every
part of the being, mental,
moral, and physical.

116

Life and Love.

XIII.

PERIODIC ACTIVITY.

CTIVITY in reproductive life is, like most
other, possibly all other, activity, periodic.

Periodicity seems to be a uni-
versal law of nature, operating
in every direction where motion
exists ; and vital motion is no
exception to the general rule;
life, too, ebbs and flows in what
may be a universal rhythm.

Physical life seems to be but a
mode of motion. When motion
ceases. life ceases, — from the
chemical activity by which cells
convert crude material into their
own living substance, to the more
external and visible motions of
the body as a whole, this essen-
tial fact of motion is evident. And

more obscurely, the periodic habit of motion is

also evident.

Unseen and for the most part unsuspected, the
cell performs its chemical motions of combination

Pertodie Activity. 117

and disintegration, — grows and dies; the body as
a whole wakes and sleeps, grows weary through
exercise and rests through repose. Waste and
repair follow each other from egg to adult; from
birth to death building up and tearing down con-
tinually succeed each other.

Nowhere is this periodic activity and repose
more marked than in the reproductive life.

A period of fertility and of great activity of the
whole organism is followed by a time of sterility
and rest.

In all the higher life the reproductive activity
has its periods of quiescence when the phenomena
of sex attraction, of egg and sperm maturing, are
for a time non-existent. During this period of
natural rest the organism has opportunity to make
good the waste of the preceding generative activity
and to prepare for similar future developments.
For after this season of rest there follows the sea-
son of reproductive activity, when again the egg-
cells mature in the female, the sperm-cells in the
male. As the wave of life rises to its crest in the
reproductive system, it produces a corresponding
exhilaration in other of the body tissues. As the
activity of the reproductive centres increases, the
whole being breaks into a spontaneous and sympa-
thetic anthem of quickening life.

The living creature glows from excess of gener-
ative vitality, it bursts out in gay colors, in new
growths; all the differences between the two sexes

118 Life and Love.

become exaggerated. And as the difference be-
tween them increases, the attraction they feel for
each other also increases.

Why they experience this powerful attraction for
each other they do not know, they only know that
in the society of each other alone is contentment,
is peace and joy,—in short, is life.

What life is, we do not know. What this power
is that attracts one sex to the other, we do not
know.

What it is that mutually attracts iron and mag-
net, or planets and sun, or bodies and earth, we do
not know. We only know that everywhere is
manifest this strange power which in some way is
associated with all matter and all life. We may
call it love, or magnetism, or gravitation, but that
does not explain it.

We know that in some primal way sex attraction
is a part of the general law of attraction every-
where manifest in the universe, and that like all
other activities it waxes and wanes, rises to culmi-
nation, subsides to rest.

The season of love over, the high office of love
discharged, the phenomena of the reproductive
period disappear. Colors fade, horns are shed,
plumes fall. Life passes from crest to hollow.
Sometimes the creature passes on to extinction;
where this is not the case, a longer or shorter
period of quiescence intervenes between the repro-
ductive renewals. The length of time of this

Periodic Activity. 119

period of quiescence usually depends upon the
species of the creature, it being as a rule very
definitely marked. It continues for a time, then
appear again the signs of the coming season of dis-
quiet, and that strange drama of life is played over
again, — the drama so fraught with meaning for the
future; the drama upon the successful playing of
which depends the continuance of life on the
earth,

As the body of the animal grows more complex,
so do the forces that play upon and control it
express themselves in a more involved manner.

In the single-celled organisms we find an almost
mechanical union of two cells.

The protozoa which unite are drawn together
with as little consciousness probably as are the
magnet and the iron. This attraction which causes
them to seek each other can hardly be dignified by
the name of love, though the germ of love is cer-
tainly there.

In more complex, but still low, forms of life, we
find any male attracted by any female, as any bit
of iron is attracted by any magnet; that the
hunger of one set of cells for the other be appeased
is the only consideration.

This too, if it can be called love at all, is but the
dawn of that great passion.

Higher, in certain of the insects for instance, we
find involved new forces; sex attraction is no
longer the simple attraction of one cell to another,

120 Life and Love.

or of one body to another; the most delicate
psychic problems are involved. It is not enough
for one creature to be male and another female;
there must be other sympathy between them to
draw them irresistibly together. There is now
choice exercised, principally on the part of the
female. It is no longer he who arrives first who
wins, but he who pleases best.

Every structural development is now taken
advantage of by the male, whereby he can hope to
arouse interest in the heart of his beloved. Find-
ing his wings developed in ridges which can be
made to sound by rubbing, he eagerly produces his
stridulating sounds, piercing the air with his cager
love-cries. Wherever his armor admits of sound
vibrations, he unceasingly develops this musical
instrument by use. Where color is his form of
reproductive activity, he displays his brilliancy in
his most engaging manner. Where his ardor
breaks forth in weapons, he assures his beloved of
his devotion and fearlessness by engaging in gladi-
atorial combat for her diversion. And she, most
charmed by the most actively developed of her
adorers, selects the handsomest, the strongest, or
the bravest for her mate, thus preserving the high-
est standard for her race.

In this way is the race modified, sexual selection,
as Darwin calls it, playing its part in conjunction
with natural selection.

Although courtship among the insects is both

Pertodic Activity. 121

varied and entertaining, it is among the birds that
one discovers the most pleasing expressions of
love.

Love of beauty is a dominant characteristic of
the bird, and in its love life its exquisite and fine
nature reveals itself to the full.

Beautiful color, graceful motion, engaging
sounds, unite to enhance its happiness. How har-
monious and delightful is the love-call of the bird!
The shrill, intermittent chirp of the insect is re-
placed by a flood of melodious and varied song;
instead of rasping or beating upon a rude shield,
it breathes forth sweet sounds from a delicate
throat perfected by love for the purpose.

The love that animates the bird seems to us
finer, more subtle, more spiritual than any other
love in the lower life. It is not a passion of a
moment; the concentrated vitality of its brief life
is not exhausted in one final expression. Its love
mounts to culmination, and then instead of being
extinguished passes on to yet higher and finer
regions, — into the marvellous and powerful attrac-
tion known as parental love.

Gleams of this love appear in creatures below
the bird in the scale of life; some fishes, for in-
stance, know it.

When the breeding season approaches, certain
of them, as the bass and stickleback, make for them-
selves nests and perform the office of householders
and of careful parents, rearing their progeny,

122 Life and Love.

nourishing and protecting them with the solicitude
usually attributed only to higher forms of life.

Why does the parent bass linger about his nest,
protecting and succoring the young fishes when
they hatch? Why is he not away in the free waters,
sporting with the waves, supplying himself with
abundant food? Why docs he stay thus in one
spot, denying himself the joys of fish life?

Love has conquered selfishness. He cannot
leave his tender progeny to an uncertain fate.
They will soon grow large enough to swim away
and care for themselves, and they will leave him
alone, probably he not even knowing them later
from the numberless other fishes in those waters.

Those insensate eggs lying in the water, what
pleasure can they afford him? They have not the
magnetism of his mate which caused every cell in
his being to glow with aroused vitality at her
approach. What is their society to him? They
cannot move in delightful curves with him through
the water, they are not bright and beautiful; then
why should he sacrifice himself to their uncertain
welfare ?

Verily, some attraction they have for him, some
subtle, magnetic power which links him to the
future. In them lies the future, and he, moved by
the strange power that causes him to desire the
continuance of his race, gives himself to the secur-
ing of future life.

Below the bird, except among certain insects,

Pertodic Activity. 123

the care of the young is rare; in the bird it is
almost universal, and what is unusual in all but the
highest form of earth life, the male too is imbued
with a strong parental instinct.

Parental love is one of the blossoms of the plant
of which sex-love is the root; less selfish, more
altruistic, it is, like the flower, a finer development
of the parent stem.

124 Life and Love.

XIV.

THE MAMMAL.

N passing from the lower to the higher forms of

life we come finally to the great division of the
mammals. The mammalian
division is an extensive one,
and its chief, man, marks it
as the one most familiar as
well as all-important to us.
In it is most fully illustrated,
so far as our limited powers of
observation now take us, that
great faculty we call the mind.
This division is made illustrious
by that in man which has been
called “‘ the mind of the mind,” ' the
inner mind,” the psyche, the soul,
that by which we aspire, by which
we understand the meanings of life
and of the universe.

In this division are to be found
man’s most familiar friends and allies,
as well as some of his more dreaded enemies,
—the horse, the cow, the pig (though he does
not seem to know whether to class him as friend

The Mammal. 125

or foe), the dog, the cat, the elephant, the wolf,
the bear, the lion, the tiger, and lower down in
the scale, the rabbit, the squirrel, the mouse with
his big brother the rat, and all the furry deni-
zens of fields and woods. The whales, too, be-
long to this class, and the porcupine, although so
disguised by its forbidding spines, and the bat,
in spite of its wings, and the armadillo, in spite of
its turtle-like covering, with many others.

The mammal is warm-blooded, like the bird, but
unlike the bird it brings forth its young alive and
nourishes them with milk secreted by the mam-
mary glands. It is from these glands, or mam-
mz, as their external forms are called, that this
division of the animal world gets the name of
mammal.

The higher and more complex the life, the
greater the effort to reproduce it, and the more
elaborate the devices for conserving the reproduc-
tive material.

The lavish waste seen in the fish and other forms
is discreetly avoided by the bird; the loss which
the insect sustains because of its exposed and
orphaned eggs, the bird also avoids by the exer-
cise of intense parental solicitude.

In the mammalian life the conservation of the
reproductive material is, as would be expected,
carried to a yet higher degree.

Although apparently so different from other
forms of life, the mammal too issues from an egg.

126 Life and Love.

The egg cradles all life. In the lower life it is
frankly exposed to view, but in the mammal, and
in a few inferior forms, as among certain fishes,
this is not the case. The existence of the egg-cell
of the mammal is discovered only upon the closest
search and observation.

Like the bird’s ovaries, the ovaries of the mam-
mal lie deep within the body-cavity, one on either
side, but foreseeing the excessive caution to be
exercised in producing this most complex of all
life, the oviducts do not enter the intestine as in
the lower forms of life, but isolate themselves
entirely from surrounding parts, having a separate
exit of their own.

The size of the egg is not in proportion to the size
of the animal, but quite the contrary, The eggs
of some of the lower forms of life, as the starfish,
are enormous compared with those of the largest
mammal. The egg-cell of a deer or of a cow is
hardly as large as the smallest sweet-pea seed.

In short, the egg-cell of the elephant would
hardly turn the balance against that of a moth.
Yet the moth will produce a few score of these
large eggs, which hasten to mature in a few months,
while the elephant will live sixteen or twenty years
before producing any offspring, and will have but
a few descendants in the course of a long life.

The development of mammalian life is slow and
elaborate. As a rule, the larger the animal, the
slower the development and the fewer the off-

The Mammal. 127

spring, — though there are many apparent excep-
tions to this rule, complexity being more impor-
tant than actual size.

If it is true that all mammals develop from the
egg, what then becomes of this mammalian egg-
cell?

Is it deposited in a cleft in the bark of a tree, or
consigned to the cold guardianship of river or sea?
By no means. It is not even deposited with pa-
rental care in a nest, and there guarded during its
slow change.

Or rather it zs deposited in a nest, but the nest
is not made of twigs, as is the nest of the bird, or
of silk, as is the egg-nest of the spider; this nest is
an adaptation of the reproductive tissue itself, and
lies securely cherished within the parental form.

The mammalian egg, like all others, ripens and
leaves the ovary periodically, the frequency with
which this occurs depending, as a rule, upon the
size of the animal, —it happening oftener in the
smaller ones.

At this time, the activity of the ripe egg-cell and
of the reproductive centres is communicated to the
whole structure; there is a corresponding exhilara-
tion and awakening throughout, and there goes
forth that desire of the cells for added life which
characterized the fish at the reproductive season,
and which characterizes all life. The whole being
is charged with a new and powerful vitality; it be-
comes like a magnet in its attractive power to the

128 Life and Love.

complement of its own life. For, like other eggs
belonging to the higher forms of life, the complex
mammalian egg-cell is not alone, in itself, capable
of reproducing. It is a feminine cell, it contains
only part of the power to develop; the full power
must come from union with its opposite; the male
element is needed to insure its development.

The sperm-cells, it is scarcely necessary to add,
are found in sperm-sacs corresponding to the
ovaries, in similar positions in the body-cavity of
the male.

Ducts connect the sperm-sacs with the outer
world, and the structure at the terminus of these
ducts recalls a corresponding structure in the in-
sects, though all is far simpler here. Still, there is
external modification sufficiently developed to
effect the conveyance of the active sperm-cells to
a position sufficiently remote from the outer world
and sufficiently within the influence of the egg-cell
to result in its attaining its desired destination.

The sperm-cell, transferred to this strange coun-
try by the union of the two sexes, cognizant in
some mysterious way of the existence of the yet
distant egg-cell, begins its journey towards it, until
finally it meets the object of its search, unites with
it, and the two, having thus become one, enter
upon that wonderful growth which shall result in
reproducing the parent form.

If for any reason the creature is isolated and the
egeg-cell not fertilized, the cgg continues its solitary

The Mammal. 129

course, and is finally launched into the outer
world quite dead. If, on the contrary, it has been
fertilized, its fate is very different.

Its assured vitality transforms not only itself but
its surroundings. It takes a permanent station in
a specially prepared stopping-place, instead of
passing on and out to extinction.

In the smaller mammals several egg-cells de-
velop at the same time, the young lying side by
side in a portion of the oviducts that specially en-
large to accommodate them; but in the larger and
higher mammals this is not so. Asarule, only one
egg-cell develops at a time, though sometimes two
develop. As the egg-cell of the higher mammal
ripens, it leaves the ovary and passes through the
oviduct to where the oviducts of both sides come
together and enlarge,
forming a hollow
chamber, or womb.

In the diagram is
represented the womb,
with the duct and ovary
of one side only, there
not being room to
show both ovaries and
ducts. In this specially prepared womb the egg
may meet the sperm-cell and unite with it, if the
sperm-cell has been previously introduced there,
or it may be that the union between egg and
sperm-cell takes place in the oviduct, the sperm-

oO)

130 Life and Love.

cell having hastened along the oviduct to mcet
it.

Having been fertilized, the egg-cell is not sent
into the outer world, but remains to grow and
develop in its living nest, in this womb, that, like
a loving mother, nourishes and protects it.

This home of the egg, lined with soft, silken
walls all embroidered with veins of crimson, and
softer than any bird’s nest, warmer than any sum-
mer ground, is the consummate device of the
world’s upper forms of life.

In this temple of the feminine world the higher
life is perfected. Here it finds a place of peace
and growth, leisure and safety to construct those
marvellous tissues which make its body. Thus is
the womb defined by one of nature’s lovers: —

“ Looking abroad at the operations of Nature, we
see an immense variety of devices. Nature works
with such skill that man consumes a lifetime in
finding out her riddles. The gem is concealed in
an almost indestructible shell of rock, the gold
in a cleft of granite, the coal and the oil at great
depths in the earth, water comes from subterranean
courses, the sap rises in the tree in a way yet
unexplained, and paints gorgeous colors, gases
necessary to life are hidden in an invisible medium
we call the air. Life, traits, character, are folded
in the egg; and the cgg itself is folded in the
water, in the earth, in the nest, and lastly in the
womb. The womb itself is the most mysterious

The Mammal. rai

hiding-place of all, because it is itself alive, is hid-
den deep within the body-cavity, protected by the
bony framework of the body, cushioned with soft
muscle, and bound by ligatures of strong material.
In this deft house of life it is lapped in crimson
robes, kept warm as no other of Nature’s designs
are warmed. It has poured upon it the best
heart’s-blood, strong white nerves signal its every
want and convey to it the great floods of life out
of the reservoir of universal being. As the egg
cradles life, so the womb cradles the egg, which
here receives that spark without which the carth
would soon be lifeless; and here it grows to that
day of complete and wondrous joy, its birth.

“So vital to nature’s existence is the womb that
she has caused her orators to celebrate it and say
that out of the Womb of Time has come Liberty,
and her poets to sing of what shall come out of
the Womb of the Future. Out of this sheltered
valley spring the flowers of genius and of goodness,
asphodels never dying, the life of races. So lovely
are the ideas which naturally cluster about this
inner temple of the world that the heart itself
seems to be but a mechanical, beating instru-
ment, while this one cherishes, clasps, warms, and
nourishes.”

Thus nourished and safe, the egg grows until it
is no longer in the egg form.

If we could look through the shell of a bird’s
egg there would appear the young bird emerging

132 Life and Love.

from the chaos of food material in which it is
immersed.

Could we look as through a window into the
womb of the mammal with its burden of forming
life, we should see the young creature enveloped
in numerous protecting and nourishing blankets of
tissue, slowly taking form. We should see the
great blood-vessels bringing to it nutriment so that
it need neither eat nor breathe, but may merely
lie, absorb the life-giving material from its mother,
and grow.

In course of time it is ready to enter the world.

The bird’s egg hatches beneath the mother’s
breast, this also has done that; beneath the
mother’s heart the young life has formed, not out
in the cold world, but safe in the tissues of her
body, absorbing her nutriment, drawing her life
into its throbbing veins.

The young bird is born; the shell breaks and
it looks upon the earth.

The mammal too is born, its time has come, and
forth it issues, perfect, — its advent entailing upon
its mother the greatest trial she has yet endured
for its sake, the terrible birth-pains. But these
too she gladly suffers, that she may solace her
maternal heart with this new and precious being
born to her, and to be yet more fully loved and
cherished.

With its advent comes a new emotion into her
life. There is born to her, not only her child, but

The Mammad. 134

a new intcrest in life, a sweeter and higher con-
ception of life. She too is born with it into a new
world.

Profound changes take place in her body during
the development of the young.

Reproductive vitality continues at its height, but
now taking a very different direction from what it
did atfirst. There is no longer the magnetism that
attracted the other sex; the whole vitality is turned
towards the completion of the forming life.

The blood flows in a fuller current, and this flow
of rich blood spends much of its power in building
up the little one.

The mother eats for it, she breathes for it; not
only this, she prepares for its nourishment after it
enters the world, for there now takes place a
wonderful transformation in certain of her tissues.
The mammary glands develop, those strange inver-
sions of the skin which pick out from the blood a
little of every material used in the structure of the
body.

When the young come forth this glandular de-
velopment is complete; not only has the mother’s
blood been taxed to supply the forming life, it con-
tinues to be taxed to supply nourishment to the
still feeble offspring.

The young of the mammal enter the world help-
less, but the mother does not fail them; again
from her they draw their nourishment in the life
giving milk which she supplies.

134 Life and Love.

Even the power of the bird’s maternity pales
before this stupendous accomplishment.

In the mammal, sex activity hastens on to a
higher plane of love, a long-continued love of
offspring.

During the time the unborn young are develop-
ing, and as Jong as they are dependent upon her
care, the mother turns no sex thought to her mate.
Only after the beloved offspring have passed
beyond the need of her care, and the reproductive
activity again expresses itself through the maturing
of the egg-ccll, does she think again of that other
love. During the time that she is nourishing the
young, both before and often long after their birth,
all other reproductive activity is in abeyance; the
ege-cells do not ripen; all the vitality is expended
in perfecting the life already started upon its
career,

Sometimes the mammalian male takes an interest
in the support and care of his offspring, but gener-
ally not.

True to his primal masculine nature he is more
active, more variable, and more egoistic, — in other
words, more selfish.

Maternity is necessarily unselfish; the long asso-
ciation with the young, the long sharing with it
and caring for it, causes the mother to think first
of another instead of herself. This end has been
forwarded too, no doubt, by her more quiescent,
less changeable nature. Thus has maternity been

The Mammal. 135

one of the prime sources whence have arisen the
altruistic tendencies of the higher life.

Often the effort of the mother to produce milk
for her young causes a sad depletion of her own
tissues, and it is not uncommon for her to yield
her life in giving birth to her offspring.

The reproductive organs are extremely sensitive,
and while suffering the changes incident to mater-
nity are peculiarly liable to disease, so that among
the higher animals the great balance Of compensa-
tion swings, and there too death stands as a menace
to love.

136 Life and Love.

XV.
VARIABILITY AND INHERITANCE.

N all life, both low and high, the power to re-
produce depends upon a certain resemblance
between the two parents. Sex
attraction is operative only
within narrow limits.

Long ago, we are told, there
existed strange creatures on
the earth. There were then no birds
such as now live, and no mammals.
1 Reptiles and birds were not yet
* separated from each other, but there
existed creatures which were a sort of
mixture of both. In course of time
the descendants of these
~~ strange reptile-birds became
more decidedly reptile-like on the one hand, and
bird-like on the other.

In early ages all life seems to have found it
easier to take new forms than it does now, and so
there arose the race of reptiles as a result of cher-
ishing the most reptilian characteristics of the
reptile-bird form, and developing these character-
istics to the exclusion of others.

Variability and Inheritance. L37

On the other hand certain descendants of the
reptile-bird emphasized the bird characteristics
and progressed away from the reptilian, until there
was developed the race of true birds.

As birds and reptiles receded in structure from
each other they became strangers in more senses
than one, and lost all power of sexually attracting
each other. The reptile was aroused to expressions
of love by a reptile like itself, the bird by a bird like
itself, and it is owing to this loyalty of the repro-
ductive passion that species remain distinct.

A robin loves only a robin, consequently the
robin race is steadfast.

From the. lowest to the highest life, is every-
where seen this loyalty to kind.

Reproduction is possible within but very narrow
limits; each form of life is isolated from every
other form, and even within the physical limits
there has arisen the limit of individual choice, so
that the robin will not accept any other robin as
a mate, but only such a one as it finds personally
agreeable.

On the borderland of this physical reproductive
limitation creatures can be induced to accept each
other, but the result is contrary to nature, as is
shown in the sterility of the offspring. The mule,
for instance, is the descendant of a horse and an
ass, and often possesses no reproductive power, as
a penalty for coming from parents too far removed
from the bonds of perfect race sympathy.

138 Life and Love.

On the other hand, the too close blood-relation-
ship of parents is not conducive to robust posterity,
and if continued may in time cause the extermina-
tion of the race. Horses, for instance, bred from
near relatives, are exceedingly delicate, and require
more care than those which are of mixed blood.

In some animals near relationship produces off-
spring defective in some way. It would seem that
within prescribed limits, the vitality of an unrelated
life were necessary to the highest good of the
creature, just as in flowers the best results often
come from fertilization from a stranger plant.
Nature resents any attempt to curtail that marvel-
lous possibility of variation which comes from the
union of two who are not directly connected with
each other.

Because of this necessity of the species to repro-
duce within its own limits, there exists stability of
form; because of the tendency: of the individual to
choose a mate not of its immediate family, there
exists strength and individual varicty.

Mammals, like birds, express choice in mating,
and some are said to take their partners for life,
the selection being as a rule made, not from the
immediate family, but from among strangers.

As a result of this tendency to choose a mate
from an unrelated family, the new life through
inheritance has a boundless reservoir from which
to draw variability and strength, and so may find a
permanent place in the crowded ranks of life.

Variability and Inheritance. 139

Whatever increases the creature’s power of vary-
ing increases its possibility of progressing. For it
is through the mysterious power of inheritance
combined with the power to vary, shown most
actively by the male, and transmitted by him to
his posterity, both male and female, that animals
finally reach that form which is best adapted to
their particular surroundings, and which, as life
evolves, is expressed in ever higher forms.

In time of peace and plenty and freedom from
all hardship, most of the creatures that are born
will live, no matter in what way they may have
shown variation; but let there come a time of
hardship, and those which have the best endow-
ment of strength, or other quality for resisting or
overcoming the adverse conditions, will live, and the
less fortunate perish. The descendants of those
that survive, inheriting their characteristics, will the
better survive, and in course of time, after many
weedings-out of those less capable of enduring the
conditions, there may be formed some particular
variety of creature of a distinct and definite form.

This power of the creature to come into har-
mony with its surroundings depends upon two
things, — its ability to vary, and its ability to trans-
mit its new powers through inheritance.

Variability and inheritance are the most impor-
tant factors of reproduction, and to these powers
is owing the multiform variety and beauty of life
on the earth,

140 Life and Love.

Natural selection and sexual selection doubtless
help to determine which of the numerous forms
constantly arising shall continue. Among the
plants, as we have seen, the insect makes itself a
Providence, determining form, color, odor. And
among certain animals man performs a_ similar
office, taking the place of Nature in creating cir-
cumstances for his own purposes or fancy, and by
knowledge of the laws of inheritance and repro-
duction causing the animal type to vary at his will.

Desiring to develop certain characteristics, he
removes the animal from surroundings unfavorable
to such development. Plump cattle being advan-
tageous to him, he feeds and shelters his flock so
that the more tender may survive as readily as
any; then by selecting those males and females
most prone to accumulate fat, he obtains in time a
breed of animals easily fattened and of tender
flesh. If milk is his object, he proceeds in the
same way, feeding abundantly, and sheltering,
knowing that nutriment and warmth are conducive
to reproductive activity; and selects for breeding
purposes the best milk-givers and their male off-
spring.

Thus has man made himself a’ Providence in
the case of many of the lower animals, modifying
them in almost any way he pleases by continual
selection. He has developed long-horned, and
short-horned cattle, short-legged sheep and almost
no-legged pigs; has modified the coats of sheep

Variability and Inheritance. 141

and goats, the feathers of birds, the forms of
horses, the forms and instincts of dogs; there is no
change which he has not at some time or other
produced in some of the lower animals.

Man has no power to create a*form, he has wis-
dom to take advantage of the great power to vary
which characterizes the higher life; and when for
some obscure reason there arises a form useful to
him, he sets it apart, protects it, nourishes it, and
makes it the progenitor of many descendants.

If the short-legged sheep born one day in New
England had belonged to a herd roaming over
difficult places it would not have survived. The
fact that it could not jump was no disadvantage
to it in its master’s fields, and to him the fact that
it could not jump being a distinct advantage in
fence-making, he carefully preserved the short-
legged lamb, and its short-legged descendants
until he had a flock of short-legged sheep, much
easier to control than the ordinary long-legged
variety that delighted in jumping over walls and
fences.

Man has discovered that by the application of
intelligence to the laws of nature, any animal life
may be changed.

Fine qualities and great beauty may be devel-
oped, gross qualities and ugliness eliminated.

Nor is this power limited to the physical growth.
Intelligence, gentleness, and affection may likewise
be evolved by the same methods.

142 Life and Love.

Impressed upon egg and sperm-cell are not only
the physical characteristics of the ancestors, but
also their mental and emotional characteristics.

A fine mind and a good heart leave an immu-
table impress upon the reproductive cells, so sensi-
tive to whatever affects the life to which they are
united, and which it is their office to pass on.

Although they appear so small to us, they are
boundless in capacity to receive and retain im-
pressions from their universe, the living body.

They are like the human mind in this limitless
power of receptivity.

Strange, vital cells, apparently but tiny drops of
protoplasm, apparently as simple in structure as
the amoeba, they force us to bow before a mystery
as limitless as it is sublime.

No wonder that the ancients avowedly wor-
shipped the mighty force of regeneration. Strange
that any should stand insensible to its beauty and
its holiness.

Nutrition and Reproduction. 143

XVI.

NUTRITION AND REPRODUCTION.

Ve is the imme-
diate cause of re-
production? What in-
forms the creature that
the time for providing for
future generations has
arrived?

To answer this question
let us return to the ameeba.

We are told that a divi-
sion into two is necessary
in order that the creature
by diminishing its size may
obtain an adequate food
supply. Of course the bulk
of protoplasm which com-
posed the body would in
crease much more rapidly
than the surface; and as
food is received from the
surface only, there could
not be sufficient to nourish
the creature beyond a cer-
tain size. So the first cause

144 Life and Love.

of reproduction, if this betrue, is hunger. The
desire for nutrition, that is to say starvation, causes
the creature to resolve into small portions which
can be more easily nourished than the larger lump.

Likewise, the attraction of one single-celled
creature to another is explained as a desire for
added nutrition; two starved individuals coming in
contact absorb each other, in other words, unite
their waning vitalities, and thereby gain new vigor.

One thing in favor of this theory is the fact that
reproduction takes place in the low forms of life,
as a rule, when the parent nears the end of its
vitality. It springs into existence, waxes, wanes,
reproduces, dies, — reproduction being in this case»
perhaps, a memory of those past ages when all life
was that of the single cell, and when it preserved
its existence by division, or by union and division.
So now it preserves its race by this resolving again
into single cells, —though these cells themselves
are all that continue.

“My vitality is decreasing,” it seems to say, —
“my life is going out; I will produce again my
primal form of a tiny protoplasmic cell, and thus
save myself.”

But it is no longer able to divide its whole sub-
stance into these cells; only one tissue in its body
responds; and foreseeing the lessening vitality,
it buds off portions able to live and develop once
more into the complex adult form. The form
itself, all but these fortunate cells, perishes.

Nutrition and Reproduction. 145

What is true of the lower forms of life in this
respect is essentially true of the higher; reproduc-
tion does not normally take place during the period
of most active growth.

The higher animal, starting as an egg, makes
marvellous gain as it develops from the simple
ege-cell to the complex animal built of countless
cells; it absorbs nutriment and builds up its body,
the gain far exceeding the loss. So active is its
life, so full, that it increases in size and complexity
at a rate which must appear marvellous when one
stops to consider it. But this gain, this phenom-
enal growth is not unlimited; there comes a time
when the creature grows less rapidly, there is a
diminution of the building-up force; this diminution
in the creature’s power to increase in size hints at
coming dissolution. There may be a long period
of balanced existence, when loss and gain virtually
equal each other, when bodily and mental power
are at their best, but there is an inherited memory
of death, and there is felt the desire for help, —
perhaps for nutrition; there seems to be a fore-
cast of inability to continue growing, and the old
remedy, the remedy descended from the age of
single-celldom, is resorted to. “I must diminish
this vast mass of cells which packed so closely to-
gether will not always be able to find renewal; I
must resolve again into primal simplicity; I must
break up into simple units,” it seems to say, and
forthwith finds the body too complex to resolve

if)

146 Life and Love.

again into single units, — only one primal tissue
remembering the old, saving method, and budding
off single cells to live and grow.

So in all animals when there approaches the
time of diminishing growth, with the lessening of
the surging tide of life there is developed the re-
productive activity; like the amceba, which, finding
its life waning, gathered its forces together and
separated into two parts, does the higher life, per-
haps as an inheritance from its single-celled origin,
concentrate its vitality in the production of these
life germs.

Having been so abundantly nourished that it not
only could sustain life, but could add to its bulk,
it reaches a point where this vital power of storing
up and growing ceases ; and as this grows less, the
reproductive activity increases.

We say the animal has its growth; what is that
but saying its tide of life no longer is rising?

It pauses at the turn of tide; then follows a period
of longer or shorter duration, in which loss and
gain balance each other, the impetus of growth
sometimes continuing in a lessening degree for a
period after reproductive maturity.

Reproductive activity is at its height for a sea-
son, the wave of life is at its crest, then the balance
is on the side of loss. Vigor gradually departs; we
say the animal is growing old,— finally the inevit-
able cessation of the vital forces ensues, and death
results.

Nutrition and Reproduction. 147

Thus is the drama of life played among the
highest creatures as it is among the lowest, — with
this difference: in the higher life the whole process
of decline and decay is retarded, —life does not
pass suddenly to the catastrophe, as it does in the
case of the butterfly.

But even here Death stands ready to follow
Love. The season of love is a sign of coming
dissolution. Here too, as in the amceba, an
incipient starvation is felt, though not recognized
as such.

In the salmon the glow of the skin does not pro-
ceed from excessive nutrition; on the contrary, it is
the result of increased activity, joined to lessened
nutritive material; for during its season of repro-
ductive activity, although such profound changes
are affecting its body, it does not eat, and the
great changes are effected at the expense of the
material already accumulated. The skin changes
are in truth a form of disintegration, of breaking
down; they speak of death rather than of life.
This again recalls the butterfly, with its super-
active winged life and its delicate nutriment; and
the final death of the salmon, unable to recover
from the stupendous reproductive loss, again recalls
the fate of the butterfly.

Most of the skin changes which occur at the
reproductive period are, from a physiological point
of view, waste.

The overwhelming and sometimes fierce demand

148 Life and Love.

for love is the cry of starvation, the fear of death.
This condition, the individual supposes, concerns
himself, but instead it concerns the race, he being
but a means to anend. The race must live; the
individual, at any cost, must provide for this; there
must be no possibility of failure. So the instinct
of race preservation is in some instances greatly
overbalanced, and in individual cases may even
operate to the injury of the individual.

Not all creatures encounter death as the imme-
diate successor of love, but be the interval short
or long the sequence is the same, and in all crea-
tures reproduction is a sign of coming physical
dissolution, and is always more or less exhaustive
to the parent.

In the lower forms we see the parent entirely
consumed in producing offspring. When the
protoplasm of two cells of spirogyra, for instance,
has united for purposes of reproduction, the life
of that filament of spirogyra is at an end. The
beautiful filament with its bands of green is de-
prived of all life —it falls to pieces— it dies.
Only the united cells of protoplasm or © spores”
remain to produce new filaments another season.

The parent lives in the offspring, its own indi-
viduality ceases, it dies and disintegrates, — con-
tinuing its earthly life only through its power of
reproduction.

Wherever there is special activity in the repro-
ductive centres, there is a corresponding brief

Nutrition and Reproduction. 149

exhilaration, followed as a rule by exhaustion.
During, or immediately after, the breeding season,
the animal is unfit for food; every one knows how
flabby and tasteless the oyster is during the r-less
months; its plumpness and firmness have been
sacrificed to the production of life-germs, just as
the richness and food value of the salmon, and
of all fishes, are sacrificed at that time to the
same end.

Abundant nutriment favors reproduction, as is
shown in the case of insects, which, finding abun-
dant food, multiply with astonishing rapidity. All
other animals are subject to the same law: given
abundant food, and the individuals rapidly increase
in numbers; diminish the food supply, and there is
a corresponding reduction in births, — both within
limits. Excessive nutriment, like absolute starva-
tion, may prevent reproduction, — the vitality
appearing to expend itself in disposing of the
unnecessary material.

While abundant nutriment favors reproduction,
lack of nutriment, within limits, hastens the repro-
ductive period; that is, the power to live and grow
sooner reaches a climax, and dissolution sooner
manifests itself in the effort to reproduce.

Warmth, as favoring nutrition, precipitates the
reproductive period; so that the inhabitants of
warm climates mature younger than those of cold
climates.

If, on the other hand, the climate is very cold,

150 Life and Love.

so as to retard nutrition below a certain point, the
reproductive period is hastened, not asa sign of
abundant nutrition, but of the exact opposite.
Here, as elsewhere, we find opposite causes pro-
ducing like results.

It is an interesting fact that abundant nutriment
favors the production of females; thus, certain
insects, during the scason of the most abundant
food supply, lay eggs from which isstte females,
while the later, less well-nourished eggs give birth
to males.

During a prosperous season, too, or for several
successive prosperous seasons, females may be the
only forms produced, the eggs containing vitality
enough to develop without fertilization. Now
comes a change, food grows scarce, the less weli-
nourished female lays eggs, and from them issue
males!

The fertilized, therefore better nourished, eggs
of the queen bee develop into queens or workers,
which are imperfect females, while the unfertilized,
ill-nourished eggs are those from which proceed
drones. The young queens, too, are fed upona
specially nourishing food, which enables them to
perfect the female type.

Even in the higher forms of life the sex of the
offspring is intimately associated with nutrition, —
abundant nutrition resulting in the formation of
females; scant nutrition, of males.

This does not necessarily mean that the con-

Nutrition and Reproduction. I51

sumption of abundant food on the part of the
mother will result in the production of female
offspring. This is doubtless true in the simple,
lower forms of life. In the higher forms it may
not be true. The various tissues appropriating
food with unequal readiness, one kind may thrive
and the creature present a well-fed appearance
from an accumulation of fatty tissue, while the
reproductive tissues have more feebly appropri-
ated nutriment, and produced as a result males.

In the higher life the production of male or
female seems to depend upon the power of the
generative centre to appropriate nourishment.

It is probable that abundant nutriment, warmth,
and composure ¢evd to the production of females,
even in the higher forms.

Since reproduction and nutrition are so inti-
mately connected, it is not surprising to find that
the age at which the reproductive system matures
is a gauge of the length of life.

In the higher animals, the length of life seems
to be four to five times that of the period of
maturity; thus, the dog, which develops at two
years of age, has a life lease of about ten years;
the cow, which becomes sexually mature at two or
three years of age, lives from twelve to fifteen, and
the elephant, which is not sexually mature until
about twenty, lives a corresponding length of time.

It is also worthy of note that in early youth the
weaker, less well-nourished male succumbs sooner

152 Life and Love.

to privation than the stronger, better nourished
female; so that where there is an excessive number
of males produced, particularly in the higher life,
a correspondingly greater number die during the
period of infancy.

Thus is reproduction, in all its manifestations,
in some deep way, closely related to nutrition;
the Arst great need of the individual is in some
obscure manner also the first great need of the
race,

Value of Sexual Reproduction, 153

XVII.
VALUE OF SEXUAL REPRODUCTION.

NTERESTING and eventful as is the fact of
reproduction from the union of two, there no
doubt has arisen in the minds of many the query,
What is the necessity for two sexes? Why could
not the result be more easily and economically
obtained by one.

Why cannot perfect reproductive cells be bud-
ded from every creature, perfect cells containing
within themselves power to develop into perfect
beings?

There are several deep-lying reasons for the dual
necessity, some of which must already have sug-
gested themselves to the questioning mind.

Remembering the history of certain of the pro-
tozoa, and how the union of one with another was
a matter of self-defence against starvation, then °
recalling the close relation between reproduction
and nutrition in all creatures, it may not be unrea-
sonable to suppose that the effort of higher life to
produce the complex and vital reproductive ele-
ments is so great as to demand a division of labor
in the first place, and the union of forces in the
second.

154 Life and Love.

aN Doubtless there was orig-
s Or x
“=, inally but one sex,— from
uf the simple substance of the
ee

_? simple creature were budded reproduc-
tive cells capable of developing with-
out union with other cells. Gradually,
as the life became more complex,
there was a division into two sexes.
Hints of the original one-sex method
still linger in curious and instructive
abundance, however,— certain creatures
still reverting to it upon occasion; some
insects, for instance, at certain seasons
“of abundance laying eggs which de-

ar
oy velop without fertilization, while at
i other seasons, of diminished abundance,
a the eggs are always fertilized.

There are crustaceans which have the
habit of laying eggs capable of devcl-
oping without fertilization, and high up
in life, even to the mammals, there
have been observed the first changes
in the unfertilized egg, -- changes
which usually
take place only
after fertiliza-
tion. These
changes _ pro-
ceeded but a
little way, how-
ever, never de-

veloping into the later stages.

Value of Sexual Reproduction. 155

Gradually, as the life became more complex,
there were evolved creatures that budded off two
kinds of reproductive cells, one individual develop-
ing both kinds. Traces of this primitive hermaph-
roditism are found in a// the higher life.

Even in the highest mammals, including man, the
reproductive glands are at an early period neither
distinctly male nor female; for a certain Jength of
time it seems to be uncertain whether the develop-
ing egg will produce male or female. In the form-
ing life the beginnings of the reproductive organs
of both sexes are present. Later, conditions of
nutrition seem to have decided in favor of one or
the other, and the male organs are gradually devel-
oped at the expense of the female, which linger as
the faintest traces, or the reverse is the case.

So, as life advanced, the original hermaphrodite
developed to perfection but one set of reproductive
cells, and thus there was a division of labor effected.

In the embryo, as the creature developing from
the egg is called, there reside the germs of both
sexes, but in all the higher life the germs of only
one sex finally develop in an individual.

Tremendous vitality is employed in the produc-
tion of reproductive cells,—so great that, if this
reproductive activity in the higher life be prevented
the whole organism undergoes change. Instead of
being muscular and active, it becomes obese and
sluggish. The nutriment that otherwise would
‘have gone to the production of reproductive ele-

156 Life and Love.

ments and activity, under these changed conditions,
concerning which more will be said later, is used
in storing up reserve nutriment in the body.

The higher the life, the more arduous the task
of reproduction ; for which reason there doubtless
has been evolved the division of labor resulting
from the employment of the sexes.

The final union of the two cells themselves has
not unjustly been attributed to the same reasons
which are supposed to draw the two protozoa
together. An incipient starvation on the part of
both may have led them to unite, attracted by the
powerful magnetism which exists between these
different atoms. It is the active, ill-nourished male
cell that always seeks the passive, well-nourished
female-cell and dissolves into its substance.

The particular need of the female cell seems to
be stimulus rather than nutrition.

Stored up in the egg ofa fish or a bird is power
almost sufficient to develop into a new being, but
it cannot quite accomplish this stupendous feat.
Impressed upon each tiny egg-cell in some myste-
rious way is a memory of the whole ancestry of its
race, — of the individual peculiarities of its parents
as well as of countless ancestors.

Is it any wonder one egg cannot complete the
whole process by itself?

It desires help, it seeks more power, and this it
gets from a cell apparently unlike itself and having
power by this very unlikeness to impart to it that

Value of Sexual Reproduction. 157

vital impulse which shall cause it to overcome its
inertia and take upon itself the prodigious task of
producing again that complicated and delicate
structure whence it issued.

Such a task might well appall. And well might
the single cell hesitate and wait for inspiration and
help to fulfil it.

This stimulus and inspiration the male-cell is
well adapted to bestow. Its excessive activity,
united with the excessive nutriment of the female-
cell, produces the conditions necessary to enable
the now complete cell, the cell which is now in a
high degree both male and female in its power, to
achieve a growth which shall result in a new being.

Thus does the separation of the two sexes con-
serve the power of the creature.

Whatever first caused the separation of the
sexes, the result was that re-enforced vitality and
power of variation upon which the activity of the
higher life seems to depend.

So unless this separation had taken place it is
difficult to see by what means the higher life could
have arisen.

The higher life then owes its existence to sexual
reproduction.

Activity is essential to life, and the higher life
seems more dependent upon variety to maintain its
complex activity than the lower life; so that where
creatures nearly related breed together, the lack of
difference between them results, in many instances,

158 Life and Love.

in enfeebled or defective offspring, and these
being unable to perform the arduous necessities
of life, their family may die out.

In animal life, as in other forms of motion, the
equilibrium must not become stable, or else motion
ceases. Cessation of motion in living matter
means death.

So the higher life has pursued its remarkable
upward career by virtue of having established
methods for securing variation.

The most important and effective cause of varia-
tion is the production of offspring from the union
of two. For instance, instead of having one grand-
parent, the creature which is the result of sexual
reproduction has four. That is, from four imme-
diate different sources has come vital power and
variability to the individual.

To appreciate the meaning of sexual reproduc-
tion, look back along the ancestral line for twenty
generations. If there was but one parent, in
twenty generations there would be but twenty
ancestors — but twenty individuals from whom to
inherit possibilities. No, not twenty, only one.
For all these twenty ancestors would be but con-
tinuing divisions of the same individual, so the
same characteristics would be repeated over and
over again, the final descendant differing from the
first only in so far as the natural tendency to vary,
which seems inherent in all life, had triumphed.

Where there are two parents, how great is the
difference !

Value of Sexual Reproduction. 159

Two parents means four grandparents; and as
each grandparent had in turn two parents, that
implies eight great-grandparents; and, having gone
back twenty generations we are confronted by the
creditable number of one million forty-eight thou-
sand five hundred and seventy-six ancestors !

Think of that! In twenty generations each de-
scendant from two parents has had over a million
ancestors from. whom to inherit power!

Certainly there need be no lack of variety here.

One ceases to wonder how certain individuals,
unlike the rest of the family, have come by their
characteristics.

Somewhere among that long line of ancestors
a long forgotten one has been revived in this
stranger in the family.

Marvellous beyond telling is this power of inher-
itance. On the tiny egg-cell, and yet more tiny
sperm-cell have been ineffaceably stamped the
characteristics of countless ancestors,— these char-
acteristics some day to be unexpectedly revived in
a remote descendant.

This wonderful power to vary, which in the
higher life seems to be intimately connected with
the power to live, gets its greatest impetus from
sexual reproduction.

Thus is the production of the higher life from
the union of two not only necessary, but the great-
est of all nature’s achievements, insuring boundless
vitality and infinite variety.

160 Life and Love.

XVITI.
INDIVIDUALITY.

HE power of variation has raised the anima)

world from the condition of simple proto-

plasm to one wherein is found the complex intel-
ligent being.

Without power to vary, all life would have
lain prostrate in the form of undifferentiated
protoplasm.

Whence came this restless, compelling impulse
to change?

All we know is that it resided in the protoplasm.

The great Lamarck made intelligence one of the
attributes of protoplasm, —not conscious intelli-
gence, but an inherent force inevitably working
towards a definite end.

It was he who said, “ Animals vary from low
and primitive types chiefly by dint of wish-
ing;” and he was well laughed at by the world
in consequence,

Perhaps the world laughed too soon.

“ Animals vary upward by wishing.” Lamarck
spoke as a great poet when he said that; and it is,
after all, the poet who illuminates the truth and

Lndividualty. 161

makes it visible to man. Science struggles with
contradictory facts until the whole subject is one
day made luminous and consistent by having
passed through the revealing light of that higher
scientist, the poet.

If Lamarck’s divination is true, there must have
been impressed upon the primitive protoplasm a
clear, far-reaching aspiration, which, all unconscious
in the lower life, raised it through form after form,
until the conscious life of man was reached. Man,
as we know, does vary upward by dint of wishing,
or as Emerson so well expresses it, “We do not
what we will, but what we wish.”

And is it not a stimulating thought that this
unity of design has run through the whole plan of
life development?

Nor does this conception of the cause of prog-
ress interfere with that evident condition and
formative power already explained as natural selec-
tion. The progress must be within certain physi-
cal limits, and within these limits the life is held by
the circumstances about it. In other words, all
things must be zz harmony with each other. As
long as a plant or an animal is in harmony with its
surroundings, with the soil, the climate, the neigh-
boring life, all goes well with it, — but if it fall out
of harmony, if the universal rhythm that seems ex-
istent in all things be broken, then the plant or
animal must pay the penalty of discord by ceasing
to live.

BI

162 Life and Love.

“ Natural Selection” is but a way of expressing
the result of inharmonious relations. A certain
harmony between the organism and its surround-
ings is absolutely essential to its existence. But
within these physical limits there is opportunity for
great variation and great aspiration, — these often-
times forming one of the factors in the law of
natural selection, the “ fittest” sometimes being the
most intelligent, the bravest, the most beautiful or
the most noble.

It may, then, be true that the divine benediction,
the necessity to go upward, placed upon the sim-
ple, potent life-basis, way back when earth condi-
tions were such that only it could live, drew it ever
upward and upward, until man himself emerged
from the apparent chaos to show the meaning
of the multitudinous, struggling, half-perfected
beings, whose imperfection was the price of his
perfection.

Impressed upon the earliest protoplasm was this
upward tendency, by which it departed from its
condition of simplicity, became complex and indi-
vidual, sexual reproduction being the method em-
ployed by the real agent, love.

In the lowest forms of life there is probably little
difference between individuals. One ameeba is
very much like every other amceba. But impressed
upon the early protoplasmic forms was the power
to vary, the desire to vary, and so life streamed
upward, one species after another emerging, each

L[ndividuality. 163

upward impulse resulting in a creature of greater
individuality.

After there was sufficient differentiation in the
beginning forms of life to produce two distinct
sexes, thus bestowing great power of variation
through many ancestors, the gain on the side of
individuality cannot be overestimated.

Individuality is the beneficent result of sexual
reproduction.

Power to vary, power to be different from others,
power to be ove’s self, distinct from every one else,
—this is individuality, and this is the boon sexual
reproduction has given to the world.

From sexual reproduction as a starting-point
have come too, by slow degrees, the higher faculties.

Through it has come a knowledge of the joy of
sharing the strongest and deepest pleasures with
another. Sexual reproduction made impossible
that frightful selfishness which must have charac-
terized all life, if each individual had lived alone
and for self, or even for self and offspring.

Sexual reproduction bestowed at the same time
individuality and universality.

It created the individual; it forbade the individ-
ual to live for himself alone.

On a low plane at first, it passed upward to illu-
minated regions.

_Love has given the initial motion to intellectual
and spiritual life, and is still the most powerful
force of earthly existence.

164 Life and Love

Although scx has created the individual, sex
activity is not the property of the individual. The
being who makes the mistake of supposing this,
and of subverting the office of sex to purely per-
sonal use, pays the penalty of the breaker of primal
laws.

The function of sex is for race purposes, not
individual purpose. Nature works ever on a
grand scale. She creates individuals, but never an
individual.

The individual in the process of evolution is
always sacrificed to the race, which, for the time,
is nature’s unit. Sex, therefore, does not belong
to the individual, but reaches out through him, and
past him, into that greater, more important fact, —
the race.

Hence individuals frequently suffer loss and even
death, that the greater end may be accomplished.

Yet, contradictory as it may seem, the individual
is evidently the final end of nature’s aim. The
final completion and perfection of the individual is
the ultimate end of the race.

As life advances it tends to become more and
more individualized. The individual tends to con-
trolthe race. The man of genius, the most highly
individualized of created beings, has the power of
generations of ordinary mortals. His influence
outweighs that of multitudes of other men, and
may ultimately affect the thought, and conse-
quently the life, of his whole race.

Lnitividuality. 165

The meaning of this apparent contradiction is
clear; through countless imperfect individual forms
does life pass, ruthlessly crushing the too imper-
fect, ruthlessly chastening the multitude, to attain
finally a more perfect individual life.

Meantime, all through life, from lowest to high-
est, the struggle of individual against race goes on,
always to the defeat of the individual. Half blessed
by a partial knowledge of the joy of life, the full
knowledge is concealed in the future, and it is to
the final revelation of this that life, aspiring, baffled,
still struggles upward,

Nowhere is the struggle between individual and

‘race more severe than in the reproductive life.

To attain race ends the reproductive faculty is,
as Emerson expresses it, vastly “ overloaded,” par-
ticularly in the highest of all life, where the accom-
plishment of race ends is most important.

For this highest life all life has in one sense
existed; through the upward struggle of multitudi-
nous lower forms human life has emerged, weighted
with many fragments of unsloughed imperfections,
blessed with a great cumulative torrent of upward-
tending desire.

Partly, perhaps, because man remembered past
pleasures and desired a repetition, even when no
physiological necessity impelled him, and partly
through ignorance of the laws of life and happiness,
which cannot be violated without full payment of
heavy penalty, he has precipitated upon his race

166 Life and Love.

and fastened there an inheritance of abnormal
generative activity, which it devolves upon the en-
lightened race of the future to restore to normal
condition. Because of these early mistakes the
human race has suffered inexpressibly through its
generative power. It is at once individual man’s
highest blessing and his greatest misfortune.

Himself highly individualized, he has sought to
put himself before his race. He has not under-
stood the universality of his importance.

He has not fully learned how to use his most
important physical function in strict obedience to
nature’s law of race progress, and at the same time
derive from it the highest individual benediction.
He has not fully reconciled himself as an individual
to himself as a universal force.

As life has moved upward to the present man’s
creation, so will he by immutable laws be com-
pelled to move upward to the perfection of the
man of the future.

Nature is inexorable. As ruthlessly as she has
sacrificed individuals to the good of the race in the
past, will she continue to sacrifice them to the
good of the race in the future.

From the beginning there has been produced an
infinitely greater number of living beings than the
earth was able to nourish. From the lowest to
the highest life this overcrowding has been con-
stant. More offspring have been produced than
could by any chance survive.

Lndividuality. 167

At first glance this seems an unnecessary and
cruel waste of life, but a moment’s reflection shows
that nature made no mistake in her cosmic plan
when she so decreed, for out of the great strug-
gle for existence which was thus rendered neces-
sary, there came progress. Only the strongest or
wisest or best in some direction gained the advan-
tage of their circumstances and lived. And ever

the great struggle went on, generation following
generation with here a little gain and there a little
gain, until there emerged from the progressive
conflict life as it exists on earth to-day, varied,
beautiful, still in conflict, still progressing. And
on it will go. Whatever is unlawful, inharmoni-
ous, unbeautiful in its relations to the universe
must die,

168 Life and Love.

Sex-life too is struggling towards perfection;
the problems besetting it are many, and cannot be
fully answered to-day, but the future will certainly
answer them fully, and to the highest good of the
race,

Change of thought and custom are a part of the
history of the past, and will be of that of the future;
but this contains no menace.

The tendency of life is upward, and upward it
will sweep, — perhaps not without faltering and
pausing, or even apparent temporary retrogression ;
yet, nevertheless, inevitably.

Male and Female. 169

AIX.

MALE AND FEMALE.

if lia beautiful variety which social life displays

with its harmonious inter-relations, is the
outcome of sexual
reproduction, and
depends upon the
inherent differ-
ences between
male and female,
and their methods
of adaptation to
each other.

Since sex is so
universal, and since
the sex character-
istics remain the
same from highest
to lowest, the results of sex
life are essentially the same
through the whole cycle of
living things.

The female is the first
form of life; primitive, un-
changing, lasting, she represents the conservative
element of life.

170 Life and Love.

The male, born later into a world not wholly
reconciled to him, fighting his way to a permanent
place, eager, restless, desiring change, represents
the progressive element of life.

At first small, insignificant, only half necessary
to the continuance of the species, in some cases a
mere parasite on the female, in other cases doomed
to die or to be put to death by his own companions
as soon as his race function has been performed,
gradualiy he has achieved permanence and impor-
tance, exercising his power of variability and activ-
ity, until finally he has, in some instances, turned
the tables and even essayed to dominate the female
life, which, calm, stable, has kept steadily on, retain-
ing its primitive characteristics through the most
diverse conditions. Thus it has come to pass that
the mammalian male, big of bone, strong of muscle,
fierce of temper, has constituted himself, in some
cases, the ruler of his species.

Although, in the higher life, the creature is even
at birth stamped with many of the characteristics
of its sex, these characteristics are not fully devel-
oped until the time of reproductive maturity. Up
to that time there is comparatively little difference
between the members of the two sexes.

They are impersonal, alike. At reproductive
maturity they rapidly diverge and become unlike.
Up to this period there is no special attraction on
the part of one for the other, but after maturity
this is different; as the unlikeness between them
increases, the personal attraction also increases,

Male and Femate. 171

They recognize in each other an individuality
different and agreeable. :

Sex maturity is to the individual what sexual
reproduction is to the race.

It bestows strength, variability, individuality.

Although it is so often the harbinger of death,
while life does continue it is literally transformed
and illuminated by the mighty power of the per-
fected sex activity.

When the caterpillar, for instance, passes through
its pupa form and emerges as a butterfly into its
sexually mature state, it is a different being from
what it ever had been before.

It seems to have entered upon a finer and higher
life; it has cast aside the more earthly for the
more spiritual form.

Its pleasures are of a different and higher type.
It has become complete. Life in it glows in a
warmer and brighter flame.

Love is the cause of this transformation. To the
butterfly the condition of love, the power of love is
life, this winged, bright life; the expression of love
is death. Isolate the butterfly so that he lose not
the vital reproductive principle and he continues
to live. The love flight having once been taken,
death is his portion.

This close connection between love and death is
everywhere apparent in the lower ranks of life. in
many instances the act of reproduction terminates
the life of the parent,

ize Life and Love.

The same mortality is remotely apparent in the
higher ranks.

The biologist proves beyond question that repro-
duction is a process of destruction, that where this
power announces itself, it is a sign of coming dis-
solution. Death is the price the many-celled
creature pays for its more complex form, its higher
powers.

As the insect lives the higher life for a brief
period, and then dies as the result of this beautiful
development, so does the higher animal live its
life of conscious joy and sorrow, and then die as a
a result of this power of consciousness.

Only the single-celled organisms, which have no
conscious life, no great ecstasies or aspirations,
live on with no necessity for death.

Yet none would choose the immortality of the
amceba, with its simple unseeing life, as a condition
of this immortality.

“ Better fifty years of Europe
Than a cycle of Cathay”
is applicable all along the line.

Death would be beautiful and welcome, were it
the necessary condition of even but one moment
of conscious life and knowledge.

A single moment of intelligence followed by
earthly oblivion, were worth countless ages of
unconscious protoplasmic life.

Although xcproduction is incipient death, yet
does it also express the fullest life. Its advent

Male and Female. 172

shows life at the crest of the wave, and while in
low forms the reproductive period is quickly
passed and life ended, in higher forms the life is
protracted. Instead of one tremendous effort re-
sulting in many offspring and involving fatal par-
ental sacrifice, there are recurring efforts resulting
in but few offspring at a time, and terminating
less tragically to the parent.

So complex is the higher life that but a limited
number of descendants can be perfected at one
effort.

So here we see the flame of love, instead of
bursting forth in one great consuming conflagration,
glowing in a steady fire that periodically bursts
forth into more intense activity, then subsiding,
but never dying, warms and vitalizes continually,
intensifying and exhilarating splendidly at these
recurring intervals of increased power.

The transformation worked by love in the higher
life is as great, though not as apparent, as that
worked by it in the butterfly.

What might be termed the larval state of the
mammal bears no outward resemblance to that of
the insect. Yet the young mammal is a very differ-
ent creature from the adult form. As maturity ap-
proaches we know that all the tissues of the body
undergo change. The young creature emerges
from nonenity to individuality through the acquire-
ment of sex power.

The young mammals of any given species much

174 Life and Love.

resemble each other in form, in disposition, in
voice ; there is little to distinguish them. As repro-
ductive maturity approaches, a subtle change passes
over them; gradually each creature frees itself from
the uniformity of childhood, and becomes an indi-
vidual with distinct personality and marked charac-
teristics.

The whole structure, as we know, responds to
the stimulus: the female grows more distinctly fem-
inine in outline, less rugged, more delicate; the
male acquires a new robustness, grows large and
powerful, with increased strength to match the in-
creased size.

This is life at the crest of the wave. Growth
ceases, the creature lives on for a certain time, full
of vigor and powcr, perfect in every part. In the
higher life the sex development, as a part of the
general body development, so powerfully affects
the life that one almost loses sight of the primitive
meaning of reproduction, — that it is the forerun-
ner of certain dissolution.

The universal baby form is lost, the individual
form is found; the larva becomes the imago.

In the lower life, change of form is to human
ken the most conspicuous change; in the higher
life this is no more marked than the change of
mind and disposition.

The gentle, playful Jersey calf, for instance, in
taking on the ponderous form of adult life under-
goes a change of mind and heart as well. He

Male and Female. 175

becomes fierce and determined, delights in expend-
ing his masculine activity in frightful encounters
with his rivals, and at all times is easily excited to
irascibility. The cow, on the other hand, gives up
youthful sportiveness, does not as a rule show an
active desire to engage in combat, unless her calf
is in jeopardy, when she will valiantly defend it.
Instead of growing more active, she grows less
active.

As a result of physical changes in the vocal
organs the voice also changes at maturity.

The senseless baa of the calf becomes the sono-
rous low of the cow, or the harsh and terrifying
bellow of the bull.

All through the mammalian life corresponding
changes are more or less evident. Young lions
are pretty and innocent pets, playful, and as a rule
good-natured, — like all babies. The two sexes
closely resemble each other, neither having the
characteristics which mark the adult forms. At
reproductive maturity, there emerges from the
universal babyhood, on the one hand the feminine,
slender, more docile female; on the other the
distinctly masculine, powerful male with his im-
posing mane, — his helpless baby cry grown into
a roar that strikes terror to the heart.

In our familiar friend, the domestic cat, the
change is not so much in form as in disposition, the
male evincing greater restlessness and pugnacity.

The dog at this period loses his puppy voice,

176 Life and Love.

that infantile falsetto being changed to a manly
bass. He also grows quarrelsome, and shows an
inclination to demolish strange dogs. As a puppy
he is friendly, and shows littie discrimination in per-
sons, liking every dog that does not offer to bite
him, and delighted with the caress of any human
being.

Later, he is less general in his friendships. He
discriminates, and offers to fight certain dogs, dis-
carding all overtures of peace; he becomes highly
individualized, has distinct likes and dislikes for
people, and develops the feeling of obligation
which makes him guard his master’s property. If
he comes of hunting-stock he expresses more defin-
itely his desire to hunt, and the method of hunting
he is best able to employ.

From a puppy like all other puppies, he be-
comes a distinct individual.

As arule, the male is most profoundly affected
by maturity, and everywhere shows the greatest
amount of change.

As the individuality increases, the power to
change diminishes.

During his unformed puppy stage the dog learns
easily, and then can be trained to many habits use-
ful or pleasing to man. Later, the power to change
lessens, that is, the growzvg power is in abeyance,
the ideas and habits have become fixed, the direc-
tion of the individuality is determined, and it then
is more difficult for him to learn new ways.

Male and Female. 177

Through all the higher life individuality becomes
emphasized at the period of reproductive maturity ;
and the higher the life, the more marked is the
change.

The power and beauty of adult life are intimately
connected with the reproductive faculty. That is
the source of the most tremendous stimulus to the
mind as well as to the physical life.

12

178 Life and Love.

.

AK.

MATURITY.

EFORE maturity the creature has no personal
individuality, yet is independent of its race.
It lives for itself, not for the race.

After maturity the highest personal individuality
is achieved, and independence of race lost.

It is no longer free from obligation to its race.

It has come into its kingdom, it has found
itself, but does not belong to itself.

The reproductive activity, as we have seen, is
universal, not only throughout all life, but through-
out the individual. Its action is not confined to
one tissue or one class of tissues; directly, or
indirectly, it affects all.

Every ccll in the female organism responds to
the strange feminine impulse sent to it from the
tiny cells at the reproductive centre. Infinitesi-
mal in size, these cells, nevertheless, exercise a con-
trolling power over the whole structure. Through
their decree femininity sits enthroned, with its
many graces.

Every cell in the male yet more vigorously
responds to the message of masculinity sent it by
the super-active sperm-cells.

Maturity. 179

The female is less profoundly affected by repro-
ductive development, because the life at the gen-
erative centres is more calm, more gentle, more
conservative; less generative material is produced,
and little is lost.

If the reproductive cells, for any reason, fail to
develop, the result is interesting. If the ovaries be
removed, for instance, there is no characteristic
feminine development.

If, from a similar cause, the sperm-cells are pre-
vented from forming, there is no distinctive mascu-
line evolution,

The female, undeterred by the restraining femi-
nine reserve, develops more actively in those tis-
sues most inclined to activity, the skin and its out-
growths, and so approaches more nearly to the
male type; while the male, unable to exercise his
powerful masculine activity, approaches toward
the female type, the two meeting, as it were, on a
common neutral plane.

As might be expected, the vigor of the male
body is most affected by this loss of reproductive
power.

If the sperm-cells are forbidden to form in the
first place, there will be no development of mascu-
line characteristics. And even after the full mas-
culine power has been developed the continuing
presence of the sperm-cells is necessary to pre-
serve the vigor and masculinity of the creature.

The presence of the fertilizing fluid within the

180 Life and Love.

male organism acts as a powerful tonic to all the
tissues. The muscular power is greater, the courage
higher, the individuality more pronounced, because
of the influence of this life-giving material.

In order to reduce the restless, determined, and
often fierce male animal to a tractable condition,
and make him available in performing various
labors, man has deprived certain of the lower ani-
mals, notably the horse, and bull, of their repro-
ductive power by removing the sperm-sacs. This
castration, as the operation is called, is often per-
formed in the infancy of the creature, when, of
course, no reproductive material ever matures, and
when, as a result, the animal itself never matures.
The calf so treated never acquires the attributes
of his sex. He can never become the sturdy,
stout-horned, powerful-necked, deep-voiced, fierce-
tempered bull. Instead, he undergoes a general
deterioration from the male-type form; his horns
refuse to become the sturdy defensive weapons they
otherwise would have been, and instead grow long,
slender, curving, like those of the cow. His neck
will not become so strong and broad, his eye
will never glare so fiercely, his voice will develop
into a low like that of the cow. His muscles will
not become so strong, firm, and elastic. He will
attain great size and tend to grow fat. In short,
he will become the dull, placid, slow-moving ox,
not so strong by one third as he would have been,
had he been allowed to develop naturally as a

Maturity. 181

beast of burden. He is not so strong, and there-
fore not so valuable, but on the other hand man
considers the loss in strength far more than com-
pensated by the improvement in temper. His
disposition, like his big, loose-celled body, is calm.
He does not like to hurry; he is more vegetative
than active.

His flesh is not so high-flavored, it is more deli-
cate; and for this reason countless numbers of
cattle are forced to undergo the change, the flesh
of the bull being strong and unpalatable.

Having lost, as a calf, the power to develop his
most noble characteristics, the castrated animal
remains an overgrown calf to the end of his days.

American horses are in the same way impelled
to gentleness and obedience. With their imper-
fectly developed bodies they retain their undevel-
oped dispositions, are mild and manageable in
harness, and good servants.

What they gain in servility, they lose in strength,
like the ox; they lack the muscular power of the
perfect animal.

Deprived of the consuming activity of the
sperm-cell, the animal often grows to a great size,
becoming correspondingly sluggish and lazy.

Animals thus changed are very likely to grow
fat. The perfect male does not as a rule store up
much fat. His uneasy, active nature uses up the
nutriment as it comes to him. Fat is only reserved
food material, and the active creature uses what he

182 Life and Love.

gets without regard to the future. As all animals
tend to take on fat when deprived of their mascu-
line activity, man has not been slow to profit by the
fact in raising them for food. The pig, naturally
lean and agile, has by man’s power of selection
and his knowledge of certain laws of life, been
reduced to a mass of fat and slothfulness.

In the domestic animals man has taken upon
himself the offices of natural and sexual selection;
producing, not the forms most advantageous to the
creature itself, but those most advantageous to him.
He has reduced one animal to a milk-giving ma-
chine, another to a fat and meat producing instru-
ment. By protecting and nourishing his useful
friends and developing them in directions beneficial
to him, he has produced a race of animals wholly de-
pendent upon him for their existence. Should these
animals, by some chance, be turned loose to com-
pete with their wild brethren they would quickly be
exterminated, any that survived speedily reverting,
through their descendants, to the original wild form.

In many cases in the higher life the creature
continues to increase in size after the reproductive
system has begun to develop. For some time

Maturity. 183

growth and sex development may go on together,
the body becoming stronger and richer in all power
because of the stimulus it gets from the developing
generative centres.

To produce the best results to the forming body
this mighty creative force must not be allowed
individual expression. Its power must be ex-
pended in the general work of strengthening and
building up desirable tissue. The time has not
come for an expression of its own peculiar power.
While growth continues, its work is preparatory, it
assists in forming first a fine body, and later, when
this important end has been achieved, may perform
its own special function to the advantage of future
generations.

If the vitality be drawn away from bone and
muscle by too early exercise of the reproductive
power, the loss can never be made good. The
creature will fail to attain the proper size and will
also fail in vigor and power.

Parentage is the dowry of the perfect adult
life, and its existence in the undeveloped creature
entails loss of vigor and all kinds of power, not
only upon the parent, but also upon the offspring.

There is not enough power to allow of bodily
development and great reproductive use at the
same time. One must exist at the expense of the
other. After the body gets its perfect growth,
there is time enough left for the exercise of that
other important function of life,

184 Life and Love.

Moreover, all through life the vigor and power
of the male are maintained by the presence in un-
wasted abundance of the fertilizing fluid. Any
excessive loss of this wonderful stimulus always
results in the deterioration, mentally and physically,
of the creature. Its power is not only to create
new forms, but to rejuvenate, to invigorate, to
.stimulate and inspire the whole organism.

It is the greatest dynamic force of male life,
endowing the being with beauty, making it a power,
and bestowing upon it an ineffable charm.

This great sex vitality is capable of conversion
into other channels, becoming a source of power in
various directions. The perfect horse, for instance,
in some countries is kept gentle and quiet by work;
the sex activity is thus capable of being converted,
to an extent, into muscle power.

Instead of being deprived of his sex power and
thereby having his strength lessened, the horse
has his superabundant activity converted into use-
ful work; and this can be done with any of the
higher animals.

Great activity cannot express itself in two direc-
tions at once. One activity exists in excess at the
expense of other activities.

Active out-of-door exercise, by supplying abun-
dant oxygen, and working off the superfluous
energy through the muscular system, tends to
prevent too great stimulus of the sex impulse..

In mammalian life the male has risen to as

Maturity. 185

important a position as the female, and it may be
that even more regard is paid by man to his
development; for it is well understood that here as
elsewhere the tendency of the male to vary is
greatest, and it is to the development of superior
males that man looks for the power to enhance the
value of his herds and flocks.

The female, being the conservative element,
nourishes that which is; the male, being the radical
element, gives the impetus to departures from the
old type.

It is not surprising to find the male more highly
individualized, as a rule, than the female. The
great benefaction, individuality, has come to all
the higher creatures through that increased power
of variation which isa result of sexual generation.
Upon both male and female, individuality has been
bestowed in abundance, perkaps upon the female
more as a result of inheritance, upon the male
through immediate power of variation. It must
not be supposed, however, that all power individu-
ally to vary has been denied the female; this
doubtless is not so. She too possesses the inner
activity which causes variation, but apparently in
less degree than her mate.

Universal in action, coming down through past
ages, working on a tremendous scale, the result of
sex life is limitless variation in both sexes.

Nature is fearless; she works in great masses
without too stern a regard for details. She makes

186 Life and Love.

a world theoretically divided into two halves, and
is by no means careful to complete each half to
the centre line.

She does not produce types; such uniformity
is not within her design.

She goes beyond or remains short of the type,
and man, like the old Greek sculptor, discerns the
ideal, as a beautiful expression of his intellectual
creative power.

Nature abhors mathematical accuracy. On a
grand scale only is she definite; her units, which
compose her great masses, are magnificently
indefinite.

Her males often balance far over toward the
female type, her females are often developed
toward male ideals.

She separates her world of life into male and
female, and then with infinite refinement bestows
upon each some attribute of the other. None
can claim for his half a monopoly of any one
quality.

In the lower life this shifting of the line of sex
characteristics has produced some strange results,
certain males habitually assuming distinctly femi-
nine functions, and vice versa.

The lower life, with its unreasoning faith in the
wisdom of Nature, however, is not disturbed by
these anomalies.

Individuality is allowed, and whoever has the
power has the right. The opinion of one creature

Maturity. 187

concerning the duty of another does not retard the
operation of the primal forces.

Individual variability is a very difficult subject to
investigate, the forces operating to cause results
being so varied and often so obscure. For instance,
in many cases the male is more teachable than the
female. His tendency to change makes it easy
for him to accept changes which are forced upon
him.

On the other hand, among certain animals, for
example the monkey, the females are said to learn
more readily than the males,—not because they
are more variable than the males, but because they
are less so. The monkey being so restless and
active, it has sometimes been found quite impossi-
ble to chain his attention to the lesson long enough
for him to learn it. His more docile partner, on
the contrary, will often pay attention, and thcre-
fore learn where he cannot be induced to do so.

To all the conclusions drawn from life there
are apparent exceptions, the result of conditions
too numerous and too obscure to be at once de-
tected. There are certain great underlying laws,
however, which, like such laws in other realms of
knowledge, are immutable.

They can be relied upon, and afford explana-
tion of what would otherwise be without the pale
of understanding.

They are discovered by regarding the whole
mass of evidence, and their exceptions are only

188 Life and Love.

apparent, — when understood going to strengthen
the law they seem to refute.

One of these laws governs the two sexes, keep-
ing them true to their ideal, no matter how much
apparent variation may be discernible.

To speak figuratively, the female is the great
centripetal force of life. It may be said that she
insures permanence, attracts as to a centre, draws
to herself and within herself, and prevents scatter-
ing and chaos.

That she is to life what gravitation is to matter.

The male, to continue the figure, is life’s centrif-
ugal force. He prevents all from gravitating to
one point and there coming to rest. He compels
repulsion from the centre.

The female, it may be said, keeps life stable;
the male keeps it from stagnation. Her stability
carried to excess would result in complete rest,
which is death; his instability, in complete unrest,
which is chaos.

Together they keep an even balance.

Opposite forces, they are of equal necessity,
equal value. Either without the other would per-
ish physically; may we not say the same of them
mentally and morally, and that they are the two
halves, always seeking to become perfect, each
through union with the other?

fluman Life. 189

XXII.
HUMAN LIFE.

IFE has swept upward to man. Beginning

with the simplest and lowliest of creatures,

away back when the earth was just becoming able

to nourish the new life forming upon it, there have

slowly come forward more and more complex

creatures, until at last man himself has been ush-
ered upon the scene.

Not in haste or unheralded did he come forth.
No new organs and no new functions came into
existence when he came. He was but the climax,
the crown of the life that had been for countless
ages evolving upon the earth.

Looking back along the tortuous and yet ever
ascending pathway life has traversed to its destina-
tion in the human form, we reverently discern that
Nature, with supreme foresight, recognized man’s
necessities in the first cell of protoplasm that
formed upon the earth. These primitive cells,
delicate, perishable in their rude and violent sur-
roundings, yet persisting and multiplying, held
within their frail substance the mighty life-force
which was later to surge over the globe in count-
less forms of amazing complexity.

190 Life and Love.

There was enough foresight in the creation of
the primitive cell to include all the coming ages of
living things, both animal
and vegetable. With what
amazing economy of de-
sign were the innumerable
forms of life framed out of
the tiny protoplasmic cell,
infinite in its mobility,

unchangeable in its ulti-

mate structure!

Nor did this sublime
economy, this vast unity
of conception, stop here.
When a complex crea-

ture, with distinct organs to
perform varied offices, was
at length built up from
these primal cells, the same
prophetic looking to a dim
and far future is discerni-
ble. An organ having been
brought into existence to
perform a certain office for
one form of life was pre-
served, modified, and
adapted to serve various
other forms.

For instance, the very lowest forms of life need
no digestive apparatus, — the food is digested by

Human Life. IgI

the body material wherever it touches it; but as the
creature became more complex, in course of time
there was buiit up aseparate apparatus for digest-
ive purposes. At first
this was but a_ simple
thing, a tube running
through the body of the
lowly, worm- like crea-
ture, by which food could
be received, moistened,
made soluble, and
drawn into the hungry
tissues, the waste being
rejected. Such a tube,
having developed to
serve the needs of the
simple creatures whence
it originated, is seen
to have been retained
through form after
form of higher ex-
istences, growing
more complex with
glands and convol-
utions as the neces- aoe :

sity for greater nu- = oe

trition increased, but never quite losing its primi-
tive form, and through all life, including that of
man, remaining but a tube for the transformation
of crude food materials into soluble matter grate-
ful to the hungry tissues.

gyfite

192 Life and Love.

The digestive apparatus courses alike through
the worm, the serpent, the frog, the lizard, the bird,
the four-footed mammal, the man. Nature, having
cunningly made a digestive tube to fit her worm,
and having made it a cosmic thing capable of
infinite expansion as life grew more complex, met
the greater needs by simply lengthening and coil-
ing the primitive tube, indenting it with glands that
also increased in size and complexity as necessity
demanded. Thus was the simple straight tube of
the lower animal type developed and elaborated to
do duty for even man himself.

And what happened with the digestive apparatus
was repeated in all the other structures. Cleverly
there was evolved a universal plan of blood circu-
lation, so that modifications of the original type
sufficed for all succeeding forms. The nervous
system, too, grew in the same way, one starting-
point being common to all animals, simple and
complex, the higher animals but showing a greater
complexity of the original form.

Organs came into being magnificently plastic.
Upon this power of mobility in growing things
depended all progress, plasticity being the most
essential endowment of life, giving that inestima-
ble power to change, to rise, to depart from the
original form, which has resulted in the present
condition of life on the earth.

Plastic, full of possibilities of form and function,
the various organs arose, and, modified in innu

Fluman Life. 193

merable directions, were handed on and on, serv-
ing not only the one form whence they originated,
but innumerable succeeding and advancing forms
as well.

Slowly, yet surely, the admirable support of the
backbone came into existence. Once evolved it
was not rejected for some other method of sup-
port, but, able to serve a multitude of forms, it
lent its aid to swimming, flying, creeping, jumping,
running, walking creatures in vast profusion. In
man it has the essential characteristics possessed
by it in all other mammals. And so we see life
one beautiful whole, united by the strongest and
deepest ties of structure and function. And when
we approach the most important physical fact of
all life, the fact of reproduction, we find it too but
one great cosmic truth, working alike from lowest
to highest, increasing in complexity as the life
ascends, until it culminates in the life of the higher
mammals. And here, too, in his physical life, man
shows his kinship to all other life. What is true of
the reproductive phenomena of the higher mam-
mals is true in every particular of him as well.
Sperm and egg-cell work out the human destiny as
they do that of lower life-forms. Human life, like
all other life, stands upon a physical superstructure.
To behold the marvels of his own form, man needs
but look out into the world of life about him and
see there the reflection of himself. His physical
needs are the same as those of his humbler neigh-

13

194 Life and Love.

bors, his hunger as imperative as theirs, his body
nourished as theirs are. He, too, needs air, light,
and warmth, and without them must die. He,
too, must reproduce in offspring his physical form
that his race may not become extinct.

Not only in physical phenomena, however, do
we find man united to all other life. As his body
is an unfolding of the possibilities of protoplasm,
that strange basis of all living forms, so are his
intellectual and moral faculties an unfolding of
certain possibilities discernible in the lower life.

Not a single power resides in man whose roots
cannot be traced down into that great world of
life of which he is the fair blossom.

In one particular only does man differ essentially
from the lower life. To him has come a transcen-
dent development of those nerve centres ky means
of which he is enabled to comprehend the world
about him. The body, which encloses and circum-
scribes the living creature like a wall, keeping it
distinct from the world without, in man offers less
obstruction to the flowing in of the universe. In
him the channels of communication with the outer
world are freer. To a degree unique in living be-
ings, he can comprehend the world in which he
lives. Not because of superior physical powers is
this so, however, for the lower animals excel him in
many directions; the dog can smell better, the eagle
can see farther, the deer can run faster, the lion
can outdo him in muscular strength; yet he has a

Fluman Life. 195

power that gives him dominion over all of these.
By this power he can outstrip the swiftest flight
of the deer, and fly above the highest soaring of
the eagle. And this power resides not in his
body, but in the marvellous activity we call his
mind.

That it is which frees him to an extent from the
fetters cast upon him by the limitations of the
body. And, his intellect having reached a devel-
opment far beyond that of any other creature, we
find life in the human being reaching out in new
directions. The purely physical desires cease to
be all-powerful, — the body is under the control of
the mind; instead of being governed by external
and accidental circumstances, it is to a new and
marvellous extent subject to the intellect.

By this powerfully developed mental function
has the human race been separated from all other
life.

Man ceases to be only an animal, he becomes
something more; he becomes a znd with a phys-
ical body as an organ of expression, instead of
being a body with a dawning mind.

With the development of the mind the vital
functions are also put upon a different plane.
Hunger is no longer a mere animal craving for
food, to be appeased at the first opportunity of
satisfying it. It is subordinate to laws of various
kinds, — not nature’s laws any longer, but mind’s
laws. The higher type of man will starve rather

196 Life and Love.

than violate these human laws. He will not eat
the first food he comes to because he is hungry;
he will not eat that which belongs to another, even
though he starve.

Hunger, too, has been beatified, so to speak -—
there is a certain esthetic feeling connected with
it which has made its gratification a social event
and surrounded it with beautiful objects.

And so his whole physical life has been placed
upon a new level in the thought of man. His
pleasures become those of the intellect rather than
those of the body, and physical gratification of any
sort is complicated by the most subtle and power-
ful mental and emotional phenomena.

Love is lifted to a new plane, invested with a
new meaning. As life dawned in the single cell,
so did love dawn in the protozoén. As life grew
more complex, so did love outgrow its first primi-
tive condition of simple cell-attraction and clothe
itself with increasing powers. Upward it struggled,
breaking out in prophetic flashes of beauty in the
lower forms of life.

Upward struggled life, creating few new organs,
but developing those already existing. And up-
ward struggled love, sparingly creating new expres-
sions, but infinitely enlarging those powers already
feebly acting.

Both life and love in the sun of human intelli-
gence blossomed in beauty, and man passed upward
to a plane not reached by other life-forms, For

fluman Life. 197

with conscious intelligence came the higher devel-
opment of the moral nature.

Man, through knowledge, became a responsible
agent; no longer wholly the creature of circum-
stance, he began to rule his own destiny and deter-
mine his own line of progression. With knowledge
came to him the sacred responsibility to live in
obedience to the laws he had discovered. The
result of obedience was the privilege of mounting
with conscious joy the heights still before him;
while disobedience brought the terrible punishment
of conscious retrogression.

198 Life and Love.

XXII.

MAN AND THE COMMUNITY.

PAeMen life presents its greatest difficulties to

our understanding, because it is not the life
of the individual alone,
but the life of society,
which must be consid-
ered. In most of the
wa lower animals the con-
trolling causes are few
and simple, and directly
referable to the crea-
ture’s surroundings in
Nature.

In civilized man the
Nature surroundings play
a very subordinate part.
He controls Nature in-
stead of being controlled
by her; therefore it is
not Nature’s influence on
man, but the far more
complex condition of
man’s influence on man
which has to be studied.
In other words, it is the
influence of szzzd instead

Man and the Community. 199

of Nature upon man which most powerfully affects
human development. The higher and more com-
plex the civilization, the more entirely is it under
intellectual, rather than Nature control, — by Na-
ture control being here meant the influences
exerted by food, climate, and all the causes affect-
ing natural selection among the lower animals.

One of the most marked characteristics of civi-
lized man is the high development of the altruistic
sentiment, the care for others instead of the care
for self. In the lower life the creature is, as a rule,
more selfish, more egoistic, is more apt to think
first and only of self-preservation, self-comfort, self-
gratification. Exceptions to this rule are found in
the case of certain insects, which live in communities
and which show an individual subordination to the
good of the community very like that seen in
human life; and among the females of those ani-
mals that rear their young; very rarely among the
males, excepting, in part, in the division of birds,

Altruism in its scientific sense might almost be
used as a synonym for civilization, and nowhere is
the effect of altruism more noticeable than in the
sex-life.

There is a certain harsh line of division between
the sexes in the lower life which is softened and
lessenedin the human. The influence of the altru-
istic feelings, which in the human being have so
wonderfully and uniquely developed, has operated
to a certain extent to obliterate those sex-charac-

200 Life and Love.

teristics which affect the conduct of the individual,
and which, helpful to the preservation of the
species in the lower life, are opposed to the growth
of the higher nature of man.

The effects of this altruistic growth are evident
at a glance in the life of the community as a whole.
In the lower life, and in savages, the community in
its characteristics approaches the masculine type;
it is selfish (egoistic), unstable, variable. The
herd of buffalo, for illustration, roams about in
search of food and water, charging relentlessly and
destroying whatever enemy comes in its way. The
savage tribe often has no fixed abode, but roams
about from place to place; where it has a home it
is, as arule, given to frequent war with its neigh-
bors, and is liable to be uprooted by a stronger foe
and absorbed and thus lost, or it may be destroyed,
or compelled to move on. While this is true of
the savage community as a whole, that is, consid-
ered as a nation, a unit, in its internal organization,
on the other hand, it is essentially femnzne in its
characteristics; its habits are simple, stable, not
liable to change. It makes no inventions, elabo-
rates no complex machinery,

To make clear what is meant, let us compare the
savage community to a ball which is tossed and
rolled about here and there. The particles within
the ball, which compose its substance, however, do
not change in relation to one another. The ball as
a whole may be considered unstable, masculine in
its tendencies; its constituents stable, feminine.

Man and the Community. 201

Civilized life, on the other hand, presents the
opposite of these conditions. The community as
a whole is constantly tending away from the mas-
culine toward the feminine type. It is stable,
invariable; it does not change its location, it does
not seek war with its neighbors. It is quiescent,
law-abiding, altruistic in a high degree. It builds
asylums for its unfortunate members, and rejoices
in the progress and welfare of other nations, In
its internal life, on the contrary, it has moved away
from the feminine type toward the masculine.
Here is seen an expression of the greatest varia-
bility. Domestic and commercial life within the
nation grow complex, unstable. New inventions
are constantly changing the order of things. The
fiercest competition, the strongest egoism exists.

To continue the illustration used in the case of
the savage community, let us suppose the ball
rolled about from place to place to have been a
seed which now takes root and grows. The plant
is fixed as to its outer conditions, it represents the
civilized community, but internally, its cells are
all active, all highly individualized and developing
in various ways.

None can question that the elements composing
civilized society are developing the highest possible
individuality.

In the beginning the protoplasm lived, formless,
simple, sacrificing nothing to race ends.

But this condition was incompatible with prog-

202 Life and Love.

ress. Protoplasm passed on to another and higher
state, where it assumed definite form, and in con-
sequence of taking upon itself this form both
perished and progressed. Its form fell away in
time; it was said todie. Inthe higher and complex
forms of life the individual was temporarily sub-
merged that the race as a whole might advance.
This individual submergence was only apparent,
however, it being but a necessary step to the
development of a higher and more complete
individuality.

The changes in the attitude of the community as
a whole, and in the internal life of the community
are but the working out of the law of progress on
a higher plane, and are fraught with the gravest
significance. Examined closely they will be seen
to contain the conditions of man’s progress, that is,
the conditions for the expression of the highest
degree of individuality.

In approaching toward the feminine type the
community as a whole is seen to have freed itself
from the more extreme expression of the mascu-
line characteristics only, — it has become modified,
its sharp angles rounded.

Courage remains, desire to fight for the sake of
fighting goes. Energy finds expression in other
and nobler directions. Thus the community, in
acquiring certain of the feminine characteristics,
as altruism and _ stability, does not discard all of
the masculine characteristics. On the contrary,

Man and the Community. 203

there is a union of both, the highest masculine and
highest feminine characteristics being retained,
while the lower of both are discarded.

The result is a nation, strong, fearless, self-sus-
taining, yet calm, temperate, stable, considerate
of others.

In the internal life of the nation the change
which has taken place is analogous to that in the
nation as a whole.

The general tendency has been away from the
stable, unchanging, simple altruistic domestic life,
toward a highly complex, ever changing, egoistic
social life, where the struggle for existence in the
higher sense is at its fiercest. The struggle for
existence has passed from the species to the indi-
vidual. The life of the species is secured by the
conditions arising from the altruistic, stable com-
munity; the physical life of a sufficient number of
individuals to preserve the species is assured. The
struggle is now between the individuals comprised
in the community, for the higher prizes of human
existence.

The struggle is not now so much one for mere
privilege to live as it isa struggle for prestige, for
wealth and power, and opportunity to develop the
higher faculties.

In other words, the question is no longer one of
mere physical strength or adaptability, but one of
intellectual power.

In the production of man physical evolution

204 Life and Love.

seems to have reached its climax. Progress up-
ward now appears to be no longer of the body; in
man physical evolution stops, the highest seems to
have been reached. Progress has passed on from
physical expression into a new field; it has become
the development of intelligence.

Certain changes which mark the advanced com-
munity as a whole, necessarily and in no less
degree mark the individuals composing it. The
sexes are not sharply distinguished from each
other in the intellectual and emotional realms. On
the whole, men as a class probably show a prepon-
derance of what may be termed masculine charac-
teristics, as greater egoism, variability, activity;
but these masculine characteristics have been
modified, lessened, effemzniscd, so to speak. Inthe
higher type of man the best and highest feminine
characteristics have been fused with the best and
highest masculine characteristics. The fighting
instinct, for instance, has become moral courage;
the tendency to vary expresses itself in great intel-
lectual development; instability and restlessness
have become intellectual rather than physical quali-
ties, leading to notable inventions and discoveries.

Brave and gentle, strong and tender, inventive
and patient, the finest type of man owes his supe-
riority to the transforming and illuminating power
of his inheritance of womanly qualities.

And while, in the dawning light of intelligence,
woman has thus elevated her mate, he has equally

Man and the Community. 205

transformed and illuminated her life. Women as
a class doubtless show a preponderance of what
may be termed feminine characteristics, as greater
altruism, stability, less power of variability, but
these feminine characteristics are everywhere modi-
fied by the action of masculine characteristics.

In the higher type of woman the best and high-
est masculine characteristics have been fused with
the best and highest development of the feminine
characteristics. Altruism, for instance, has been
rationalized and guarded by the exercise of greater
reasoning power; stability or inertia has been les-
sened and preveuted from forming an insurmount-
able barrier to progress. The tendency to vary
has been strengthened; the more negative nature
has progressed to a more positive condition. Cour-
age, inventiveness, and greater strength of intellec-
tual perception have been fostered in civilized
woman. Her submission to man gradually lessens
before the upward progress of her mind. She
places herself as his equal, —as the other half,
without which his half-life cannot be complete.

Although less inventive than man, she still in-
vents. Genius, that crown of the power of varia-
bility, is not denied to her.

In the internal, individual struggle for the higher
existence woman develops such masculine char-
acteristics as enhance her power and her attrac-
tiveness. Retaining the highest and best of her
feminine qualities, she fuses with them the highest

206 Life and Love.

and best of the masculine qualities, until the high-
est type of woman, gentle and brave, tender and
strong, patient and inventive, is born to bless the
world.

Nor does this borrowing of the characteristics
of each by the other mean the merging of the two
sexes into one,—the obliteration of sex differ-
ence and hence of sex attraction. It means the
elevation of man by developing his masculine
qualities in the direction of their highest possibili-
ties, and by adding to manhood a new charm, a
subtle grace, an irresistible beauty. It means the
elevation of woman by the development of her
womanly qualities in the direction of their highest
possibilities, and by adding to womanhood a new
power, a deeper, more far-reaching sympathy, an
ineffable glow, and a nobler beauty.

The mind is a mighty solvent; through it the
two sexes have been united in an intellectual
union, from which has been born a new man, with
the dominant masculine characteristics developed
in their noblest direction, and enriched by union
with feminine characteristics; and a new woman,
with the feminine characteristics grandly developed
and enhanced by what was once in the province of
masculine knowledge and activity.

Thus is the sympathy between the two sexes
stronger and ona higher plane than could other-
wise be possible. The attraction of the one to the
other is more subtle and more wrought about by
noble and worthy sentiments.

Man and the Community. 207

The highest type of human love is a result of
this unique development of man and woman, To
borrow a figure, human love has emerged from
its chrysalis state; it has become the beautiful
imago.

In the early pages of this book it was said that
love was almost as great a mystery as life. Love,
too, is a physiological fact, universal in its opera-
tion, wonderful in its development, mighty in its
consequences. But in man, and we know not how
much below him, it is more than a physiological
fact.

Love glorifies human life, it transforms the
nature, enlarges the sympathies, is the source of
the mightiest inspirations.

In the glow of this divine passion the lover sees
in his beloved the centre of all beauty, all good.

His own nature softens, widens, deepens. In
her presence he has visions of greatness, of
immortality.

Egoism gives way to a sublime altruism; he is
ready to give all for his beloved. Nor is this the
end; the new and powerful emotions which assail
him overflow on all sides,—he has developed a
sympathy with the whole human race. Love grows
so luxuriantly and blossoms so divinely that it em-
braces human life and all Nature. Man sees new
and unsuspected beauties in the world about him;
he feels a strong impulse to new endeavors; he is
lifted into a region of inspiration whence he often

208 Life and Love.

creates astonishing and beautiful images to delight
his fellow-man.

Endeavoring to give expression to the visions
which fill his imagination, he creates pictures,
statues, poems, melodies, which delight and inspire
and console his fellows.

Love glorifies mind and heart and spirit. It
chastens the lower or mere physical impulses, it
strips man of his clinging inheritances from the
less exalted earth-life.

From the first, life as a whole has tended up-
ward; up, up, it has moved, through cycle after
cycle of advancing forms to man. And in man it
has moved from the lower savage to the Plato, the
Shakespeare, the Emerson. And up it will con-
tinue to move, the whole race rising toward the
plane of the most highly developed individuals.

Love has been the great power in the later
world-progress, — love, reaching out to that sub-
lime consummation, love of all humanity.

The survival of the fittest is not, in man, the sur-
vival of the one endowed with the greatest brute
force or the greatest selfishness. The teachers of
men, those whose lives and works live and influ-
ence the race are those with the finest intelligence,
the grandest spiritual growth.

If in his search after happiness and knowledge,
in his groping for the best good this world can
offer, man falls below his best; if he mistakes the
high meaning of love and its offices; if he attempts

Man and the Community. 209

to snatch pleasure from the lower rather than the
higher sources, — he lives a life of internal conflict,
without peace and without happiness. Too late he
learns that only through the higher conception of
love can life be crowned; that he has missed the
great prize which would have reconciled him to
the universal, and constituted him one of those
in the van of the upward and onward march of that
Great Progress which is inherent in Life.

Divorced from the higher human love, the finest
and grandest possession of the sons of men, he
looks back at a life wasted in the pursuit of pleasures
which turned to pain and lamentation in his grasp.
Man is ever striving, though it may be uncon-
sciously, to conceive of and to attain that high and
perfect love which shall reconcile him to life and
to the universe.

Even in failure, even when pursuing a false ideal,
there glimmers before him the saving and alluring
light of the true love. And so struggling on,
sometimes winning, sometimes failing, but always
striving and yearning, the race of man goes up-
ward. In time the efforts of these half-seeing, yet
ever longing souls pierce through the clouds, and
the sun streams with quickening radiance upon the
whole mass of humanity.

Thus does the experience of the individual
become the knowledge of the race.

14

21o Life and Love.

XXIII.
CONCLUSION.

T is the province of science to investigate, to
demonstrate, and to declare what are facts,
and not only to say what is, but also to declare
what has been. Thus are the vast periods of the
world unfolded, and thus the past history of life
upon the earth.

Many beholding the methods of science are *
seized with a fear that in the pursuit of the exact
truth about our physical world some higher and
more important truth will be neglected, or that we
must inevitably lose sight of that something which
is back of and is the cause of all physical manifes-
tations. But so far is it from true that the facts of
the physical world are rendering secondary or less
important the facts of the inner consciousness, it
has rendered them more absolutely necessary to
our thought. To draw a line of distinction, one
would say that the rise of that great method we
call the scientific —that by which we determine
facts — has so enlarged and ennobled the great
domain of the intellect which we call the philo-
sophic that we can hardly tell where it begins or

Conclusion. 211

where it ends, —just as, looking back through the
ages and seeing two great men standing side by
side we can hardly tell, when we say Aristotle,
whether we speak of the intellectual kingdom of
science, or whether we speak of philosophy when
we say Plato.

But one thing we feel certain of, — that our cen-
tury has had a method, has made discoveries, has
achieved exact results, by which philosophy has
become almost a science of certainty. And so far
have we advanced that when we look at life in all
its manifestations we instinctively feel that life is a
manifestation of a power, a force, a spirit which
constitutes its glory.

What Plato and Socrates called psyche has now
become to us our commonest philosophic thought.
We think of ourselves as psychological beings.
We do not come by our souls through any dogma
of religion, but as the highest philosophy man has
had in the world.

We can now look about us and see that, in all
races and indeed in all historic times, man has
been conscious of having a soul. The thought of
this Psyche, this Soul, this Inner Mind, related as
it must be to the whole of that power which is the
spring of all being, fills us with hope, raises us up
to great conceptions, great pleasures, and great
pains. As love is the hope of our race, so the soul
is the conscious master of it.

Multitudes now rising higher and higher in the

aL Life and Love.

conceptions of beauty and of greatness fee] that
the next great step is being taken when we shall
become conscious citizens of an imperishable uni-
verse, instead of trembling denizens of a perishable
world.

Many are seized with a growing hope that not
only we of the upper ranks have this inner life, but
that all nature shares it, and that love is its expres-
sion and its method.

In this conception is escape from materialism,
that threat of the ignorant and unbelieving.

That man is psychically related to all life is the
belief of millions in the Eastern world, and the
hope of millions in our Western world.

That man, the crown of the earth life, is advanc-
ing toward the highest expression of individuality,
and that individuality is the ultimate goal of prog-
ress, are the great truths that have been made
manifest to the Western civilization, —truths that
will make it the final conqueror of all civilizations.

That Nature is essentially and primarily material
has not been proven. It is man’s latest achieve-
ment to conceive that all existence is a unit; that
all life, all law, all love is divine; all has some
sort of development of soul. So, instead of es-
caping from Nature, of setting himself apart as
something essentially different, man, looking calmly
about him, recognizing himself as a part of Nature,
includes her in the universal scheme of develop-
ment. Instead of isolating himself, he conceives

Conclusion. 213

that those other expressions of life may share with
him in the divine love and progress. Man having
risen to a state of at least partial knowledge, per-
ceives that the whole of being is full of desire, of
aspiration, of love.

When he can rid himself of his materialism, in
part a remnant of the mistaken conceptions of an
ancient people; of his dogmas founded on a mis-
taken tradition long since contradicted by science;
when he can believe that love is in and of the soul,
will he not pull the world speedily. out of its baser
ideas, and up into its higher beauties and uses?

In that wonderful “ Story of my Heart,” Richard
Jeffries gives us this conception of man’s soul: —

“By the word soul, or psyche, I mean that
inner consciousness which aspires.”

Again he says, “I consider that the highest
purpose of study is the education of the soul, or
psyche.”

And again, “ Beyond and over the horizon I feel
that there are other waves of ideas unknown to me,
flowing as the stream of ocean flows.”

“Let me launch forth and sail over the rim of
the sea yonder; and when another rim rises, over
that, and again and onwards.”

Let us add to these words, for the inspiration of
those whose thoughts wander beyond the limits of
daily occupation into the regions of immensity
which lie so near the door of our feeble senses, this
thought from one of France’s greatest minds: —

214 Life and Love.

“Push the Infinite as far as you can. Do not
fear, you can always push it farther.”

Every day to some minds of our race new
reaches of thought open, seemingly infinite.

“Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes?
Or any searcher know by mortal mind?
Veil after veil will lift, but there must be
Veil after veil behind.”

BY

ee MARGARET WARNER MORLEY

ILLUSTRATED
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For sale by booksellers generally, or will be sent, postpaid,
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A SONG OF LIFE.

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