Lect. I.] CARE OF THE OFFSPRING. 1 3 



some cases, nature teaches even tlie stupid husband to 

 do his part in wrapping wp the children, and in keeping 

 the home safe. 



But the most wonderful part of the family arrange- 

 ments takes place before the period of hatching, or of 

 birth, the parents being unconscious agents. In many 

 cases the parents are workers together with nature in 

 preserving the germ ; albeit the casket of this treasure 

 is wholly unlike, as an egg, the infant that is to be here- 

 after in their own image and their own likeness. 



It is not in the human kind, but among the cattle, 

 that the young one is made to do most of its development 

 in the dark, so that at birth it is strong and in good 

 liking. This is the very culmination of reproductive 

 adaptation ; the furthest from the careless, thoughtless 

 state of things seen in low, fish life, where, as in the 

 cod-fish, millions of germs are sown broadcast upon the 

 waters by one mother, who is hardened against her 

 young ones, as though they were not hers. 



But the growing care of the germ by the proper living 

 mother, she hiding it longer and longer in her bosom be- 

 fore she commits it to the waters, is well seen in certain 

 sharks, that do, in the most striking manner anticipate 

 the last and most perfect specialisation of this kind. 



The family, as such, both in birds and mammals, is 

 not seen in its perfection among those creatures whose 

 young are ripest at the time of birth. Birds are divided 

 by some ornithologists into ^'Prsecoces" and "Altrices ;" 



