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Page 28
You could go on further to illustrate the facts of reproduction by bees
and ants, so familiar to children, where the drone or male bee, or the
male ant, in just the same way as in the plant, fertilizes the eggs of
the queen bee or ant by bringing the spermatozoa into contact with the
unfertilized egg in the insect's body, when the eggs thus fertilized are
laid and carefully nurtured by the working bee or ant. All children have
observed the little neuter,[19] or working ant, carrying in its
mandibles an egg almost as large as itself with an air of extreme hurry
and absorption, to lay it in the sun till the warmth hatches it into a
baby ant.
If it were further pointed out that not the male, but the female, as the
mother of the species, is Nature's chief care; that among ants the male
is sent into the world so imperfectly endowed that he cannot even feed
himself, but is fed by his female relations, and that as soon as he has
performed his function of fertilizing the queen ant, Nature apparently
dismisses him with contemptuous starvation; or--to take the case of the
drone or male bee--he is stung to death by the workers, it might help to
modify the preposterous pretensions of the male, especially of the boy,
in higher circles.
You could then pass upwards through fish with the soft and hard roe, or
male and female elements which are familiar to children, and through
frogs with their spawn to birds. Here comes in an upward step indeed. "A
world that only cared for eggs becomes," as Professor Drummond observes
in his _Ascent of Man,_ "a world that cares for its young." The first
faint trembling dawn, or at least shadowing forth, of a moral life, in
the care of the strong for the weak, makes itself seen, which henceforth
becomes as pervasive an element in Nature as the fierce struggle for
existence in which the weak are destroyed by the strong.[20]
In the bird--till now "the free queen of the air," living at her own
wild will, suddenly fettered and brooding on her nest, and covering her
helpless young with her tender wings--we see some faint image of the
Divine tenderness. In the ceaseless toil of both the parent birds from
morning till night to fill the little gaping throats we begin to feel
the duty of the strong to serve and protect the weak; and in the little
hen partridge, still clinging to her nest, when the flash of the scythe
is drawing nearer and nearer, till reapers have told me they have feared
the next sweep of the scythe might cut off her head, we see more than a
shadow of that mother's love which is stronger than death. And when we
pass lastly to the highest order of animals, the mammalia, we find them
named after the mother's function of giving suck to her young from her
own breast. They are no longer matured in an external egg, but are borne
in her own body till they are able to breathe, and seek their
nourishment from her, and then they are born so helpless that, as with
kittens and puppies, they often cannot even see.
In this higher order of animals nothing can exceed the devotion of the
mother to her young in their helpless infancy. The fierce bear will
recklessly expose her shaggy breast to the hunter in their defence.
Here, too, we find, as the Duke of Argyle points out in his book on _The
Unity of Nature_,
"that the equality of the sexes, as regards all the enjoyments as
well as the work of life, is the universal rule; and among those of
them in which the social instincts have been especially implanted,
and whose systems of polity are like the most civilized polities of
men, the females of the race are treated with a strange mixture of
love, loyalty, and devotion."
"Man" as the Duke says, "is the Great Exception," and has been defined
as the only animal that ill-treats and degrades his female.
And when at length we come to the topmost step, "the roof and crown of
things,"--Man, as you have already explained the physical facts of
life-giving on the plane of plants, and ants, and bees, where they can
excite no feeling of any kind, you will have no need to go over them
again, but will find yourself free to express the physical in terms of
the moral. Man, as a spiritual being, incarnate in an animal body, takes
this great law of sex which we have seen running through the animated
creation, and lifts it into the moral and the spiritual. The physical
love which in animals only lasts for the brief time that is needed for
the production and rearing of offspring--becomes in him a love which
"inhabiteth eternity," and unites him to the mother of his children in
the indissoluble union of marriage. His fatherhood becomes the very
representative of the Father in heaven. The mother becomes the very type
and image of the Love that has loved us with more than a mother's love,
borne with us with more than a mother's patience, suffered for us, in
the Cross and Passion, more than a mother's pangs, to bring us into a
higher life. The love of brothers and sisters becomes the first faint
beginning of the universal Church and the brotherhood of man; and the
sweet babble of their voices grows choral at length in the songs of the
Church triumphant, the unbroken family in heaven; while the Christian
home shadows forth the eternal home which awaits us hereafter.[21]
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