THE EVOLUTION OF A MOTHER 365 



undertake a vaster range of duties, often totally 

 new orders of duties ; it has to do things which 

 its forerunners had not quite learned to do, or had 

 not quite learned to do unthinkingly, and the in- 

 conceivably complex machinery requires time to 

 settle to its work. The older brain-processes have 

 been greatly accelerated even now, and appear in 

 full activity at an early stage in the infant's life, 

 but the newer and the higher are in perfect order 

 only after a considerable interval of adjustment and 

 elaboration. 



Now Infancy, physiologically considered, means 

 the fitting up of this extra machinery within the 

 brain ; and according to its elaborateness will be 

 the time required to perfect it. A sailing vessel 

 may put to sea the moment the rigging is in ; a 

 steamer must wait for the engines. And the com- 

 pensation to the steamer for the longer time in 

 dock is discovered by and by in its vastly greater 

 usefulness, its power of varying its course at will, 

 and in its superior safety in time of war or storm. 

 For its greater after-usefulness also, its more varied 

 career, its safer life, humanity has to pay tribute to 

 Evolution by a delayed and helpless Infancy, a 

 prolonged and critical constructive process. Child- 

 hood in its early stage is a series of installations 

 and trials of the new machinery, a slow experi- 



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