In this higher order of animals nothing can exceed the devotion of the mother to her young in their helpless infancy.  The fierce bear will recklessly expose her shaggy breast to the hunter in their defence.  Here, too, we find, as the Duke of Argyle points out in his book on The Unity of Nature,

“that the equality of the sexes, as regards all the enjoyments as well as the work of life, is the universal rule; and among those of them in which the social instincts have been especially implanted, and whose systems of polity are like the most civilized polities of men, the females of the race are treated with a strange mixture of love, loyalty, and devotion.”

“Man” as the Duke says, “is the Great Exception,” and has been defined as the only animal that ill-treats and degrades his female.

And when at length we come to the topmost step, “the roof and crown of things,”—­Man, as you have already explained the physical facts of life-giving on the plane of plants, and ants, and bees, where they can excite no feeling of any kind, you will have no need to go over them again, but will find yourself free to express the physical in terms of the moral.  Man, as a spiritual being, incarnate in an animal body, takes this great law of sex which we have seen running through the animated creation, and lifts it into the moral and the spiritual.  The physical love which in animals only lasts for the brief time that is needed for the production and rearing of offspring—­becomes in him a love which “inhabiteth eternity,” and unites him to the mother of his children in the indissoluble union of marriage.  His fatherhood becomes the very representative of the Father in heaven.  The mother becomes the very type and image of the Love that has loved us with more than a mother’s love, borne with us with more than a mother’s patience, suffered for us, in the Cross and Passion, more than a mother’s pangs, to bring us into a higher life.  The love of brothers and sisters becomes the first faint beginning of the universal Church and the brotherhood of man; and the sweet babble of their voices grows choral at length in the songs of the Church triumphant, the unbroken family in heaven; while the Christian home shadows forth the eternal home which awaits us hereafter.[21]

The only warning you would have to give your boy would be to point out that, as a cathedral takes longer to build than a shanty, so the human body, which is meant to be the temple of the “Lord and Giver of life,” takes much longer to mature than an animal’s.  Many an animal lives and dies of old age in the fourteen years that leave man still an immature boy.  And you must earnestly impress upon him that the whole of this part of his nature which you have been explaining to him as a great law running through animated creation and finding its highest uses in Man, must be left to mature itself in absolute rest and quiet.  All premature use of it is fatal