pawn 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, "