Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/169

Rh all that nature requires of him. But no such simple method will stop the cluttering of a hen when her egg is once well and truly laid; the social disturbance caused by the pomp of masculine vain-glory is far less inevitable than the disturbance caused by the circumstances of maternity. Yet the normal masculine claim to pomp of sound is more readily allowed in our proverbial philosophy than the occasional feminine claim.

And that is where we have gone wrong; it is really maternity which under wholesome conditions decides the social order of things; and we have been fighting against it by putting maternity into a compound and setting up paternity to crow on the top rail. We have not learned that extraordinary adaptability to sound economic conditions which we find in many birds and in a few animals. There exists, for instance, a particular breed of ostriches, which mates and lays its eggs in a country where the days are very hot and the nights very cold; and as it takes the female ostrich some 13 or 14 days to lay all her eggs and some weeks to incubate, she cannot as she does in other countries deposit them in the sand and leave the sun to hatch them, because after the sun has started the process, the cold night comes and kills them. The mother bird finds, therefore, that she cannot both produce and nurse her eggs; yet directly they are laid somebody must begin sitting on them. Well, what does she do? She goes