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Page 27
Has it not been created in a great measure by a wrong method? We begin
with human life instead of ending with it; we isolate it from a great
system to which it belongs, and treat what is "the roof and crown of
things" as a roof that tops no fair edifice, and is therefore anomalous;
as a crown that rests on a head which has been severed from its body,
and is therefore unmeaning. We obstinately refuse to live--to quote
Goethe's words again--not only "in the beautiful and the good," but also
"in the whole," which is equally necessary for a well-ordered life. What
it seems to me we need is to teach the facts of life-giving, or, in
other words, of sex, as a great, wide, open-air law, running right
through animated creation, an ever-ascending progression forming a
golden ladder leading up to man.
In explaining the facts of reproduction, I would therefore suggest that
you should begin with the lowest rung of the ladder, the simplest
organisms, such as the amoeba or the volvox. I should show how these
multiply by fission, the creature dividing into two, when it is
impossible to tell which is the father and which is the mother. I would
then pass upwards to more complex organisms, where two individuals are
required to form the offspring. You could explain the whole process by
the method of fertilization in plants, as urged in an excellent paper by
a lady doctor, published in the _Parents' Review_.[16] Let me quote her
words:
"The child can learn the difference of the names, color, and forms
of flowers as soon as it can learn anything. The next step would be
to simple lessons in the different parts of a plant--the vegetative
organs of roots, stem, leaves, passing on to the reproductive
organs in the flower--calyx, corolla, stamen, and pistil. Let the
child be taught to notice that all flowers have not quite the same
organs, some bearing stamens only, which shed the powdery pollen
and are the male, or little father flowers; while others have the
pistil only, furnished with the stigma to catch the pollen, and are
the females, or little mothers; that the one sort of flowers is
necessary to the other in producing the little seed or baby plant."
Let us take a primrose. Here the mother and father elements are found in
the same flower. At the base of the flower, packed in a delicate casket,
which is called the ovary, lie a number of small white objects no larger
than butterfly-eggs. These are the eggs or ova of the primrose. Into
this casket, by a secret opening, filmy tubes thrown out by the pollen
grains--now enticed from their hiding-place on the stamens and clustered
on the stigma--enter and pour a fertilizing fluid, called "spermatozoa,"
through a microscopic gateway, which opens in the wall of the egg and
leads to its inmost heart. The ovule, or future seed, is now fertilized
and capable of producing a future primrose. Covered with many protecting
coats, it becomes a perfect seed. The original casket swells, hardens,
is transformed into a rounded capsule or seed-vessel, opening by valves
or a deftly constructed hinge. One day this seed-vessel, crowded with
seeds, breaks open and completes the cycle of reproduction by dispersing
them over the ground, where they sow themselves, and grow and become
primrose plants in their turn, starring the grass with their lovely
blossoms.[17]
Sometimes the male and female elements grow upon different plants, as in
the catkins children are so fond of gathering in the spring.
"More than two thousand years ago Herodotus observed a remarkable
custom in Egypt. At a certain season of the year the Egyptians went
into the desert, cut off branches from the wild palms, and bringing
them back to their gardens, waved them over the flowers of the
date-palm. Why they performed this ceremony they did not know; but
they knew that if they neglected it the date-crop would be poor or
wholly lost. But the true reason is now explained. Palm-trees,
like human beings, are male and female. The garden plants, the date
bearers, were females, the desert plants were males; and the waving
of the branches over the females meant the transference of the
pollen dust from the one to the other."[18]
From these two elements, the spermatozoa, or male element, and the ova,
or female element, all life, except in the lowest organisms, is
produced.
You could point out how it is by this marvellous process of
reproduction, not only that the world is made green and beautiful, but
all animal life is fed. Corn and rice, which are only fertilized seeds,
form the staple food of a large proportion of mankind; while even the
animal in order to live has first to be nourished on corn or grass
before it can become meat for man.
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