enhanced or checked and stifled by the incidents of personal
experience in each individual. In this simple yet wonderful way
there has been provided for man a long period during which his mind
is plastic and malleable, and the length of this period has
increased with civilization until it now covers nearly one third of
our lives. It is not that our inherited tendencies and aptitudes
are not still the main thing. It is only that we have at last
acquired great power to modify them by training, so that progress
may go on with ever-increasing sureness and rapidity.

In thus pointing out the causes of infancy, we have at the same
time witnessed some of its effects. One effect, of stupendous
importance, remains to be pointed out. As helpless babyhood came
more and more to depend on parental care, the correlated feelings
were developed on the part of parents, and the fleeting sexual
relations established among mammals in general were gradually
exchanged for permanent relations. A cow feels strong maternal
affection for her nursing calf, but after the calf is fully grown,
though doubtless she distinguishes it from other members of the
herd, it is not clear that she entertains for it any parental
feeling. But with our half-human forefathers it is not difficult
to see how infancy extending over several years must have tended
gradually to strengthen the relations of the children to the
mother, and eventually to both parents, and thus give rise to the
permanent organization of the family. When this step was
accomplished we may say that the Creation of Man had been achieved.
For through the organization of the family has arisen that of the
clan or tribe, which has formed, as it were, the cellular tissue
out of which the most complex human society has come to be
constructed. And out of that subordination of individual desires