514 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



married only for a part of each week. Of these genera and species 

 of families, those varieties which are found in advanced societies 

 are the most coherent, most definite, most complex. Not to dwell on 

 intermediate types, we see, on contrasting with the primitive kind of 

 family group that highest kind of family group which civilized peo- 

 l^les present, how relatively high is its degree of evolution. The 

 marital relation has become perfectly definite ; it has become extreme- 

 ly coherent commonly lasting for life ; in its initial form of parents 

 and children it has grown larger the number of children reared by 

 savages being comparatively small ; in its derived form, comprehend- 

 ing grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc., all so connected as to 

 form a definable cluster, it has grown relatively large ; and this large 

 cluster consists of members whose relationships are very heteroge- 

 neous. 



Again, the developing liuman family fulfills, in increasing degrees, 

 those traits which we saw at the outset are traits of the successively- 

 higher forms of reproductive arrangements throughout the animal 

 kingdom. Maintenance of species being the end to which mainte- 

 nance of individual lives is necessarily subordinated, we find, as we 

 ascend in the scale of being, a diminishing sacrifice of individual lives 

 in the achievement of this end ; and, as we ascend through the suc- 

 cessive grades of societies with their successive grades of family, we 

 find a further j^rogress in the same direction. Human races of the 

 lower types, as compared with those of the higher, show us a greater 

 sacrifice of tlie adult individual to the species ; alike in the brevity of 

 that stage which precedes reproduction, in the relatively heavy tax 

 entailed by the rearing of children under the conditions of savage 

 life, and in the abridgment of the period that follows : women espe- 

 cially, early bearing children and exhausted by the toils of mateimity, 

 having a premature old age soon cut short. In superior family tyjjes 

 there is also less sacrifice of juvenile life: infanticide, which in the 

 poverty-stricken groups of primitive men is dictated by the necessi- 

 ties of social self-preservation, becomes rarer ; and juvenile mortality 

 otherwise caused decreases at the same time. Further, along with 

 the diminishing sacrifice of adult life, there goes an increasing com- 

 pensation for the sacrifice that has to be made : more prolonged and 

 higher pleasures are taken in rearing progeny. Instead of states in 

 which children are early left to provide for themselves, or in which, 

 as among Bushmen, fathers and sons quarreling try to kill one an- 

 other, or in which, as Burton says of the East Africans, " when child- 

 hood is past, the father and son become natural enemies, after the 

 manner of wild beasts," there comes a state in which keen interest 

 in the welfare of children extends throughout parental life. And 

 then to this pleasurable care of offspring, increasing in duration as 

 the family develops, has to be added an entirely new factor the 

 reciprocal pleasurable care of parents by offspring : a factor which, 



