We have been slow, slow and reluctant, to apply the laws of evolution to the familiar facts of human life. Whatever else might move, we surely were stationary; we were the superior onlookers-not part of the procession. Ideas which have possessed the racial mind from the oldest times are not to be dispossessed in a day; and this idea that man is something extra in the scheme of creation is one of our very oldest. We have always assumed that we were made by a special order, and that our manners and customs were peculiarly and ...
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We have been slow, slow and reluctant, to apply the laws of evolution to the familiar facts of human life. Whatever else might move, we surely were stationary; we were the superior onlookers-not part of the procession. Ideas which have possessed the racial mind from the oldest times are not to be dispossessed in a day; and this idea that man is something extra in the scheme of creation is one of our very oldest. We have always assumed that we were made by a special order, and that our manners and customs were peculiarly and distinctively our own, separated by an immeasurable gap from those of "the lower animals."Now it appears, in large succeeding waves of proof, that there are no gaps in the long story of earth's continual creation; some pages may be lost to us, but they were once continuous. There is no break between us and the first stir of life upon our planet. Life is an unbroken line, a ceaseless stream that pours steadily on; or rather, it grows like an undying tree, some of whose branches wither and drop off, some reach their limit part way up, but the main trunk rises ever higher. We stand at the top and continue to grow, but we still carry with us many of the characteristics of the lower branches.At what point in this long march of life was introduced that useful, blessed thing-the home? Is it something new, something distinctively human, like the church, the school, or the post office? No. It is traceable far back of humanity, back of the mammals, back of the vertebrates; we find it in most elaborate form even among insects.What is a home? The idea of home is usually connected with that of family, as a place wherein young are born and reared, a common shelter for the reproductive group. The word may be also applied to the common shelter for any other permanent group, and to the place where any individual habitually stays. Continuous living in any place by individual or group makes that place a home; even old prisoners, at last released, have been known to come back to the familiar cell because it seemed like "home" to them. But "the home," in the sense in which we here discuss it, is the shelter of the family, of the group organised for purposes of reproduction. In this sense a beehive is as much a home as any human dwelling place-even more, perhaps. The snow hut of the Eskimo, the tent of hides that covers the American savage, the rock-bound fastness of the cave-dweller-these are homes as truly as the costliest modern mansion. The burrow of the prairie dog is a home, a fox's earth is a home, a bird's nest is a home, and the shelter of the little "seahorse" is a home. Wherever the mother feeds and guards her little ones, -more especially if the father helps her, -there is, for the time being, home.This accounts at once for the bottomless depths of our attachment to the idea. For millions and millions of years it has been reborn in each generation and maintained by the same ceaseless pressure. The furry babies of the forest grow to consciousness in nests of leaves, in a warm stillness where they are safe and comfortable, where mother is-and mother is heaven and earth to the baby. Our lightly spoken phrase "What is home without a mother?" covers the deepest truth; there would never have been any home without her. It is from these antecedents that we may trace the formation of this deep-bedded concept, hom
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