physiology, afford the evidence of the essentially biological truth which has been so often expressed by the present writer in the quasi-poetic terms already set forth. Let us, then, first remind ourselves how the individual, whether male or female, is to be looked upon in the light of the work of Weismann in especial, and how this great truth, discovered by modern biology and especially by the students of heredity, affects our understanding of the difference between man and woman. Setting forth these earlier pages in the year of the Darwin centenary, and the jubilee of the "Origin of Species," a writer would have some courage who proposed to discuss man and woman as if they were unique, rather than the highest and latest examples of male and female: their nature to be rightly understood only by due study of their ancestral forms, ancient and modern. The biological problem of sex is our concern, and we may have to traverse many past ages of "æonian evolution," and even to consider certain quite humble organisms, before we rightly see woman as an evolutionary product of the laws of life.

But, first, as to the individual, of whatever sex. Observing the familiar facts of our own lives and of the higher forms of life, both animal and vegetable, with which we are acquainted, we must naturally at first incline to regard as worse than paradoxical the modern biological concept of the individual as existing for the race, of the body as merely a transient host or trustee of the immortal germ-plasm. Since life has its worth and value only in individuals, and since, therefore, the race exists for the production of individuals, in any sense that we human beings, at any rate, can accept, we must be reasonable in expressing the apparently contrary but not less true view that the individual exists for the race. After all, that does not mean that individuals exist and are worth Nature's while merely in order to see the germ-plasm on its way. To say that the individual exists for the race is to say that he, and, as we shall see, pre-eminently she, exist for future individuals; and that is not a destiny to be despised of any. Let us attempt to state simply but accurately what biologists mean in regarding the individual as primarily the host and servant of something called the germ-plasm.

When the processes of development and of reproduction are closely scrutinized, we find evidence which, together with the conclusions based thereon, was first effectively stated by August Weismann, of Freiburg, in his famous little book, "The Germ-Plasm."[1] The marvellous cells from which new individuals are formed must no longer be regarded, at any rate in the higher animals and plants, as formerly parts of the parent individuals. On the contrary, we have to accept, at least in general and as substantially revealing to us the true nature of the individual, the doctrine of the "continuity of the germ-plasm," which teaches that the race proper is a potentially immortal sequence of living germ-cells, from which at intervals there are developed bodies or individuals, the business and raison d'être of which, whatever such individuals as ourselves may come to suppose, is primarily to provide a shelter for the germ-plasm, and nourishment and air, until such time as it shall produce another individual for itself, to serve the same function. This is another way of saying what will often be said in the following pages—that the individual is meant by Nature to be a parent.

We shall later see that this great truth by no means involves the condemnation of spinsterhood, but since it determines not only the physiology, but also the psychology, of the individual, and especially of woman, it will guide us to a right appreciation of the dangers and the right direction of spinsterhood, and the means whereby it may be made a blessing to self and to others. This must be said lest the reader should be deterred by the unquestionably true assertion that the individual is meant by Nature to be a parent, and has no excuse for existence in Nature's eyes except as a parent. If we are to regard the body as a trustee of the germ-plasm, it is evident that the body which carries the germ-plasm with itself to the grave—the "immortality of the germ-plasm" being only conditional and at the mercy of the acts of individuals—has stultified Nature's end; and it will be a serious concern of ours in the present work to show how, amongst human beings, at any rate, this stultification may be averted, many childless persons of both sexes having served the race for evermore in the highest degree. We must ask in what directions especially may woman, most profitably for herself or for others, seek to express herself apart from motherhood. It will appear, if our leading principle be valid, that it affords us a sure guide in the welter of controversy and baseless assertion of every kind, in which this vastly important question is at present involved.

This conception of the individual as something meant to be a parent will not be questioned by anyone who will do himself or herself the justice to look at it soberly and reverently, without a trace of that tendency to levity or to something worse which here invariably betrays the vulgar mind, whether in a princess or a prostitute. For it needs little reflection to perceive that the most familiar facts of our experience and observation never fail to confirm the doctrine based by Weismann upon the revelations of the microscope when applied to the developmental processes of certain simple animal and vegetable forms. The doctrine that the individual body was evolved by the forces of life, acted on and directed by natural selection, as guardian and transmitter of the germ-plasm, assumes a less paradoxical character when we perceive with what unfailing art Nature has constructed and devised the body and the mind for their function. We flatter ourselves hugely if we suppose that even our most enjoyable and apparently most personal attributes and appetites were designed by Nature for us. Not at all. It is the race for which she is concerned. It is not the individual as individual, but the individual as potential parent, that is her concern, nor does she hesitate to leave very much to the mercy of time and chance the individual from whom the possibility of parenthood has passed away, or the individual in whom it has never appeared. Our appetites for food and drink, well devised by Nature to be pleasant in their satisfaction—lest otherwise we should fail to satisfy them and a possible parent should be lost to her purposes—are immediately rendered of no account when there stirs within us, whether in its crude or transmuted forms, the appetite for the exercise of which these others, and we ourselves, exist, since in Nature's eyes and scheme we are but vessels of the future. In later chapters we shall have much occasion, because of their great practical importance in the conduct of woman's life from girlhood onwards, to discuss the physiological and psychological facts which demonstrate overwhelmingly the truth of the view that the individual was evolved by Nature for the care of the germ-plasm, or, in other words, was and is constructed primarily and ultimately for parenthood.

Nor is this argument, as I see it and will present it, invalidated in any degree by the case of such individuals as the sterile worker-bee; any more than the argument, rightly considered, is invalidated by any instance of a worthy, valuable, happy life, eminently a success in the highest and in the lower senses, lived amongst mankind by a non-parent of either sex. On the contrary, it is in such cases as