♦270 THE EVOLUTION OF A MOTHER. 



days would have been a superfluity. All that Nature 

 worked at at that dawning date was Maternity in a 

 physical sense — Motherhood came as a later and a 

 rarer growth. The children of those days were not 

 really children at all ; they were only offspring, 

 springers off, deserters from home. At one bound 

 they were out into life on their own account, and she 

 who begat them knew them no more. That early 

 world, therefore, for millions and millions of years was 

 a bleak and loveless world. It was a world without 

 children and a world without Mothers. It is good to 

 realize how heartless Nature was till these arrived. 



In the lower reaches of Nature, things remain still 

 unchanged. The rule is not that the Mother ignores, 

 but that she never sees her child. The land-crabs of 

 the West Indies descend from their homes in the 

 mountains once a year, march in procession to the 

 sea, commit their eggs to the waves, and come away. 

 The burying-beetles deposit their fragile capsules in 

 the dead carcase of a mouse or bird, plant all together 

 in the earth, and leave them to their fate. Myriads of 

 other creatures are born into the world, and ordained 

 so to be born, whose Mothers are dead before they 

 begin to live. The moment of birth with the Ephem- 

 eridse is also the moment of death. These are not 

 cases nevertheless where there has been no care. On 

 the contrary, there is a solicitude for the Qgg of the 

 most extreme kind — for its being placed exactly in 

 the right spot, at the right time, protected from the 

 weather, shielded from enemies, and provided with a 

 first supply of food. The butterfly places the eggs of 

 its young on the very leaf which the coming cater- 

 pillar likes the most, and on the under side of the leaf 



