BIOLOGY AND ETHICS. 675 



spring, and throughout the whole animal kingdom, from the 

 mesosoa, where the female dies in giving birth to her ova, up- 

 ward, we have illustrations of the sacrificial nature of the repro- 

 ductive process. Rooted in physical wants and sensation, the 

 reproductive impulse and parental instincts are gradually re- 

 enforced by psychical sympathies and branch into altruistic mani- 

 festations. The fierce fight of the stickleback with his rivals and 

 his jealous guardianship of the nest to which he has conducted 

 his bride may be but expressions of blind instinct, and the brood- 

 ing of the hen on her eggs may be a mere indulgence in an agree- 

 able siesta, but it is impossible to doubt that in the action of the 

 walrus or tiger in desperately defending its young, even when 

 wounded and suffering, and at the expense of its own life, there is 

 an element of disinterested love. Such maternal devotion evinces 

 not reckless self-assertion and the desire to hunt down competi- 

 tors, but the antithesis of these : self-abandonment and care for 

 others. Between the mother and her offspring there is no struggle 

 for existence, but there are alliance, affection, and co-operation. 



In the pairing of mates, then, in their copartnership often ex- 

 tending far beyond the breeding season, in the provision made for 

 offspring, in the care and training bestowed on them after birth, 

 and in the establishment of family groups, all reproductive phe- 

 nomena, we have in the animal series the analogues, minute but 

 distinctive, of the altruistic emotions which in human beings, fos- 

 tered and transmuted by various agencies, have enabled them as 

 regards certain relationships to struggle out of the dismal swamp 

 of the " struggle for existence/' And in the case of human beings 

 it has, I believe, been the formation of distinct family groups that 

 has more than any other reproductive influence been contributory 

 to moral progress. The family is the social unit, the nursery of 

 goodness, the school of character, the germ-plasm of the loftiest 

 virtues, for it is by a diffusion of the feelings that well up within 

 its precincts to the clan, the nation, and the race that we become 

 public-spirited, patriotic, and philanthropic. The savage owes to 

 it his first glimmerings of ethics, and we in this country owe to it 

 the prosperity we enjoy. Its associated life necessitates a curtail- 

 ment of self-assertion, a discipline of self-will, and is incompatible 

 with irresponsible atomism, but favors the evolution in due se- 

 quence of the dispositions that fit for companionship under civi- 

 lized conditions. 



Now we have been told lately that the family is played out 

 and doomed. Mr. Pearson, in his remarkable and able work, has 

 argued that it will ultimately, to a great extent, be merged in the 

 nation. He looks forward to a state of things in which there will 

 be a weakening of the marriage bond, wedlock being, instead of a 

 union for life, a partnership during good behavior or pleasure, 



