280 THE EVOLUTION O] A MOTHER. 



ness of her purposes are most declared. For the 

 physiological gains which underlie these ethical rela. 

 tions are all-important. It is largely owing to them 

 that the Mammalia have taken their place in the van 

 of the procession of life. Under the earlier system 

 life had a bad start ; each animal had to push its way 

 upward single-handed from the egg. It was planted, 

 so to speak, on the first rung of the ladder, and as the 

 risks of life are immeasurably great in infancy, it had 

 all these risks to take. Under the new system it is 

 launched into the battle already nourished and strong, 

 and passed scatheless through the first vicissitudes of 

 youth. In the higher Mammalia, in virtue of the 

 possession by this group of a placenta in addition to 

 the ordinary Mammalian characteristics, the young 

 have a double chance of a successful start. The 

 development, in fact, of higher forms of life on the 

 earth has depended on the physical perfecting- of 

 Mothers, and of the physiological ties which bind 

 them to their young. With the immense structural 

 advance of the Mammalia, an order of being was in- 

 troduced into Nature whose continuity as an all but 

 immortal series could never be broken. Thus what- 

 ever moral relations underlie the extraordinary 

 physical characteristic of this highest class of animals, 

 there is the added guarantee that they can never be 

 destroyed. 



With the physical programme carried out to the 

 last detail, the ethical drama opened. An early 

 result, partly of her sex, and partly of her passive 

 strain, is the founding through the instrumentality of 

 the first savage Mother of a new and a beautiful social 

 state — Domesticity. While Man, restless, eager, 



