CHAPTER II 



REPRODUCTION 



L I NT ROD UCTOR Y. 



IT has ever been the natural tendency of man to make him- 

 self the measure of the universe. Being nearest and best 

 known to itself, the primitive mind essays the first explana- 

 tion of the forces of Nature in terms of its own consciousness, 

 interpreting the lower order by the higher. This has been 

 the unavoidable course of the history of human knowledge. 

 It is only in the last fifty years that Darwinism has changed 

 all this. Having irrefutably demonstrated the gradual 

 evolution of all beings from the lowest and simplest to the 

 highest and most complex ; having shown the real genetic 

 relationship of the different classes of animals and plants, 

 this new theory has given us at one stroke a real and pene- 

 trating insight into many problems of life which up to then 

 had seemed an ever-insoluble enigma. 



Instead of vainly trying to explain the lower stages of 

 life in terms of the higher, it has now become the acknow- 

 ledged method of biological science to interpret the higher 

 by the lower, seeing that the higher organisms have their 

 beginning in the lower, and gradually evolve from them. 



It fared not otherwise with Reproduction. To the 

 first investigators reproduction was, as it is now to the man 

 in the street, indissolubly bound up with the idea of sexual 

 mating as it takes place among the higher animals. What 

 happens to be merely an incident in the life of the higher 

 animals and plants, the co-mingling of the two sexes for 

 the propagation of the new generation, is looked upon as 



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