e higher
mammal is this compact, light, and agile. The skeleton is strong,
and the levers of the appendages are fitted to give rapidity of
motion even at the expense of strength. And this again is possible
only because of the high development and strength of the muscles.
Moreover, the highest mammals are largely arboreal, and in
connection with this habit have changed the foreleg into an arm and
hand. The latter became the servant of the brain and gave the
possibility of using tools.

But increase in size and activity, and the expense of producing each
new individual, led to the adoption of placental development. And
the mammal is so complex, the road from the egg to the fully
developed young is so long, that a long period of gestation is
necessary. And even at birth the brain, especially of man, is
anything but complete. Hence the necessity of the mammalian habit of
suckling and caring for the young. And this feebleness and
dependence of the young had begun far below man to draw out maternal
tenderness and affection. And the mammalian mode of reproduction and
care of young led to a more marked difference and interdependence
between the sexes.

The result of this is man's family life, as Mr. John Fiske has
shown so beautifully in that fascinating monograph, "The Destiny of
Man." And family life once introduced becomes the foundation and
bulwark of all civilization, morality, and religion. Far down in the
mammalian series, before the development of the family, maternal
education has become prominent, and the young begins life, benefited
by the experiences of the parent. How much more efficient is this in
family life. But, furthermore, the family is perhaps the first,
certainly the most important, of those higher unities in which men
are bound together. Social life of a sort undoubtedly existed,
before man, among birds, insects, and lower mammals. The community
was often defective or incomplete in unity, or existed under such
limitations that it could not show its best results, but that it was
of vast benefit from an even higher than mere physical standpoint,
no one will, I think, deny. But with the family a new era of
education and social life began.

First of all, the struggle for existence is thereby greatly modified
and mitigated. This crowding out and trampling down of the weaker by
the stronger is transferred, to a certain extent, from the
individual to the family and, in great degree, from the family to
large