one resent or think useless such an analogy between animal
love-matings and our own. In tracing the evolution of our
love-passions from the sexual relations of other mammals, and back to
those of their ancestors, and to the humbler, though scarcely less
beautiful, ancestors of these, we shall discover what must be
considered as essential and should be lasting, and what is false in
the conditions and character of the sexes to-day; and thereby we shall
gain at once warning in what directions to pause, and new hope to send
us forward. We shall learn that there are factors in our sex-impulses
that require to be lived down as out-of-date and no longer beneficial
to the social needs of life. But encouragement will come as, looking
backwards, we learn how the mighty dynamic of sex-love has evolved in
fineness, without losing its intensity, how it is tending to become
more mutual, more beautiful, more lasting. And this gives us new hope
to press forward on that path which woman even now is travelling,
wherein she will be free from the risk of clinging to conditions of
the past, which for so long have dragged her evolution in the mire.

The same force that pushed life into existence tends to increase and
perpetuate it. For when the great Force of Life has once started, the
same movements which constitute that life continue, and give rise to
nutrition, the first of the great faculties, or powers, of life. Then,
after this growth has been carried to a certain point, the organism
from the superabundance of nutrition is furnished with a surplus
growing energy, by means of which it reproduces itself, whence arises
the second of the great life faculties. We thus have the two essential
forces of life--the preservative force and the reproductive force,
arising alike from nutrition. Food to assure life and growth for the
individual; reproduction, an extension of the same process, to ensure
the continuance of the species. We thus see the truth of Haeckel's
definition that "reproduction is a nutrition and growth of the
organism beyond its individual mass," or in biological formula, "a
discontinuous growth."[8]

It is well to grasp at once this first conception of reproduction as
simply an extension of nutrition, if we are to free our minds from
misconception. It is a common belief that the original purpose of sex
is to ensure reproduction, whereas fundamentally it is not necessary
to propagation at all. It is perfectly true, of course, th