life. In the first three chapters I traced, as far as I was able, the
evolution of sex in different branches of non-human life. Many large facts
surprised me in following this line of thought by their bearing on the
whole 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