306 THE ISSUES OF LIFE 



on by impulses and instincts whicli are as compelling as 

 hunger and thirst, but the satisfaction of these rarely makes 

 for individual advantage. Indeed it is often fatal. Repro- 

 duction is often not merely the distant beginning of the 

 individual's death, but has death as its immediate nemesis. 

 In some higher animals love is its own reward and the 

 parental life is enriched by the family, but this is true only 

 of a minority. Even sexual gratification is as often absent 

 as present. According to Goethe, Nature holds that for the 

 pains of a lifetime it is fair payment to get a couple of 

 draughts from the tankard of love. But many animals have 

 only one draught and many none at all. How many insects 

 there are, with a parental solicitude and an elaborateness of 

 care that strikes one dumb, who have not even the psychic 

 reward of seeing the offspring for the good of which they 

 more or less unwittingly spend themselves. 



Professor Cresson (1913) has done a notable service in il- 

 lustrating with accuracy and learning the extent to which 

 there is subordination of the individual to the species. There 

 is the physiological cost of producing germ-cells, so obvious 

 in some fishes ; of nourishing the young before birth — famil- 

 iarly great in most mammals ; of feeding the offspring after 

 they are hatched or born — as in many insects and almost 

 all birds and mammals. There is the danger and exhaustion 

 of reproduction, for many female organisms die of it, and 

 the drone-bees are far from being the only males that are 

 sacrificed on the altar of sex. 



Taking birds, for instance, we are all more or less familiar 

 with the work of nest-making (MacGillivray counted over 

 two thousand feathers in the nest of the Long-tailed Tit), 

 with the patience of brooding (sometimes involving fatal 

 exposure), with the prodigious industry exhibited in feeding 



