ole modern sex problem. Such facts
as this; that, in the great majority of species on the earth the female
form exceeds the male in size and strength and often in predatory
instinct; and that sex relationships may assume almost any form on earth
as the conditions of life vary; and that, even in their sexual relations
towards offspring, those differences which we, conventionally, are apt
to suppose are inherent in the paternal or the maternal sex form, are
not inherent--as when one studies the lives of certain toads, where the
female deposits her eggs in cavities on the back of the male, where the
eggs are preserved and hatched; or, of certain sea animals, in which the
male carries the young about with him and rears them in a pouch formed
of his own substance; and countless other such. And above all, this
important fact, which had first impressed me when as a child I wandered
alone in the African bush and watched cock-o-veets singing their
inter-knit love-songs, and small singing birds building their nests
together, and caring for and watching over, not only their young, but
each other, and which has powerfully influenced all I have thought and
felt on sex matters since;--the fact that, along the line of bird
life and among certain of its species sex has attained its highest and
aesthetic, and one might almost say intellectual, development on
earth: a point of development to which no human race as a whole has
yet reached, and which represents the realisation of the highest sexual
ideal which haunts humanity.

When these three chapters we ended I went on to deal, as far as
possible, with woman's condition in the most primitive, in the savage
and in the semi-savage states. I had always been strangely interested
from childhood in watching the condition of the native African women
in their primitive society about me. When I was eighteen I had a
conversation with a Kafir woman still in her untouched primitive
condition, a conversation which made a more profound impression on my
mind than any but one other incident connected with the position of
woman has ever done. She was a woman whom I cannot think of otherwise
than as a person of genius. In language more eloquent and intense than
I have ever heard from the lips of any other woman, she painted the
condition of the women of her race; the labour of women, the anguish of
woman as she grew older, and the limitations of her life closed in about
her, her sufferings under the cond