The Evolution of a Mother.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5294, 26 June 1895, Page 4

The Evolution of a Mother.

In the hurry and bustle of modern life we sometimes buy onr bookß and forget to read them. In this way many of the most beautiful thoughts and lessons given by great men in great booka are loßt, or, to put it more accurately, are never found. The evolution ot the mother, as told by Professor Drummond in his "Ascent of Man," is ao beautifully explained and so olearly traced that it well deserves a wider circulation than it can obtain in its present form. It is rather' refreshing to turn from our very modern woman, who is Bhaped and shorn by society, to the far-off being of primeval times, made and moulded by the master hand of Nature alone. To. the savage mother and her babe the world owes the beginnings of all its altruistic qualities—the germs of patience, carefulness, tenderness, , sympathy and self-Baerifioe all (sprang from the woman of thousands of years ago. There was a time, says Professor Drummond, when the world was blank ahd loveless, a world without children and without mothers I For millions of yeara Nature' produoed and reproduced, evolved, unrolled, brought forth structure upon structure, type from type, ever becoming, as life ascended, more complex and more varied, and yet there were no mothers on the f ace of the earth. There were reproductive creatures that brought forth their young and instantly died; there were beings that deposited their millions of eggs and never lived to see their young alive. Motherhood did not exist; Nature did not want mothers for her inferior typeß, she wanted only the young. She made these come in myriads, and the parent ould not love myriads of ohildren. She made them fullgrown, sturdy youngsters at birth, and the parent had nothing to teach or to tend ; jor she made the yonng totally unlike in | structure to their parent, and the parent could not love what it did not recognise as its own. How could a butterfly tend and love a grub ? Motherhood, the crown and glory of humanity, could only oome when Nature had made things ready. The types of animal life at last reaohed a point in their ascent where the whole scheme of reproduction was completely changed. And then the mother arrived, because she was needed; and then, too, as Professor Drummond points out, there came upon the earth Home and Love, and all the ethical gifts associated with those saored names. How was the plan of reproduction altered P In four ways. There came one child at a birth ; the mother had time to love it. There came a ohild wholly like its mother in physical structure; the mother saw and reoognised it. There came a helpless child ; the mother's tenderness was developed. There oame a ohild physically necessary to the mother's well-being ; the mother sought her child and the child sought its mother. Theae f.ur physiological conditions of infanoy made motherhood poaaible ; heredity and the survival of the fittest are doing the rest. But the mother has yet muoh to learn. Unconscious evolution haS produced her; consoious evolution should perfeot her. And there we land ourselves on a vaat field of thought and study whioh may well occupy the minds of modern women.