Page:Ethics and Education.djvu/111

Rh that the human mother loves her young so much, and more than any one else does, because the child is a part of the mother's body, is nonsense. If the sex relations of the animal kingdom had always been monogamic and the father had always been present at the birth of the young, it is probable that he is the one who would have been charged with this tutelary function rather than the mother; for, among vertebrates at any rate, the father is the larger and stronger of the two, and the one more capable of rendering protection. Among some fishes the male assumes all the care and anxiety of parenthood; and this is true in the case of at least one family of birds (Phalarope).

Among all monogamous animals, birds and men alike, parental anxiety is more evenly divided between the sexes than it is among those races in which promiscuity is the rule. In very early times, before marriage had come into practice among men, the child took the name of the mother and belonged to the mother, the father being a wanderer and unknown. Man later usurped woman's place through his greater physical strength, enslaving woman and causing the child to take his own name. But man has never developed the great love for the child that was developed in woman in those prematrimonial ages when the father was a renegade, and the preservation of the species through the preservation of the young fell so heavily on woman.

Parental love is an expediency of evolution. It is one of the instincts that has enabled species