#PayItForward - THE EVOLUTION OF A MOTHER

"The evolution of a Mother, in spite of its half−humorous, half−sacrilegious sound, is a serious study in Biology. Even on its physical side this was the most stupendous task Evolution ever undertook. It began when the first bud burst from the first plant−cell, and was only completed when the last and most elaborately wrought pinnacle of the temple of Nature crowned the animal creation.

What was that pinnacle? There is no more instructive question in science. For the answer brings into relief one of the expression−points of Nature one of these great teleological notes of which the natural order is so full, and of which this is by far the most impressive. Run the eye for a moment up the scale of animal life. At the bottom are the first animals, the Protozoa. The Coelenterates follow, then in mixed array, the Echinoderms, Worms, and Molluscs. Above these come the Pisces, then the Amphibia, then the Reptilia, then the Aves, then What? The Mammalia, THE MOTHERS. There the series stops. Nature has never made anything since.

Is it too much to say that the one motive of organic Nature was to make Mothers? It is at least certain that this was the chief thing she did. Ask the Zoologist what, judging from science alone, Nature aspired to from the first, he could but answer Mammalia Mothers. In as real a sense as a factory is meant to turn out locomotives or clocks, the machinery of Nature is designed in the last resort to turn out Mothers. You will find Mothers in lower Nature at every stage of imperfection; you will see attempts being made to get at better types; you find old ideas abandoned and higher models coming to the front. And when you get to the top you find the last great act was but to present to the world a physiologically perfect type. It is a fact which no human Mother can regard without awe, which no man can realize without a new reverence for woman and a new belief in the higher meaning of Nature, that the goal of the whole plant and animal kingdoms seems to have been the creation of a family, which the very naturalist has had to call Mammalia.

That care for others, from which the Mammalia take their name, though reaching its highest expression there, is introduced into Nature in cruder forms almost from the dawn of life. In the vegetable kingdom, from the motherlessness of the early Cryptogams, we rise to find a first maternity foreshadowed in the flowering tree. It elaborates a seed or nut or fruit with infinite precaution, surrounding the embryo with coat after coat of protective substance, and storing around it the richest foods for its future use. And rudimentary though the manifestation be, when we remember that this is not an incident in the tree’s life but its whole blossom and crown, it is impossible but to think of this solicitude and Motherhood together. So exalted in the tree’s life is this provision for others that the Botanist, like the Zoologist, places the mothering plants at the top of his department of Nature. His highest division is the Phanerogams named, literally, in terms of their reproductive specialization.

Crossing into the animal kingdom we observe the same motherless beginning, the same cared−for end. All elementary animals are orphans; they know neither home nor care; the earth is their only mother or theinhospitable sea; they waken to isolation, to apathy, to the attentions only of those who seek their doom. But as we draw nearer the apex of the animal kingdom, the spectacle of a protective Maternity looms into view. At whatprecise point it begins it is difficult to say. But that it does not begin at once, that there is a long and gradual Evolution of Maternity, is clear. From casual observation, and from popular books, it might be inferred that care of offspring we cannot yet speak of affection is characteristic of the whole field of Nature. On the contrary, it is doubtful whether in the Invertebrate half of Nature it exists at all. If it does it is very rare; and in the Vertebrates it is met with only exceptionally till we reach the two highest classes. What does exist, and sometimes in marvellous perfection, is care for eggs; but that is a wholly different thing, both in its physical and psychical aspect, from love of offspring. The truth is, Nature so made animals in the early days that they did not need Mothers. The moment they were born they looked after themselves, and were perfectly able to look after themselves. Mothers in these days would have been a superfluity. All that Nature worked at at that dawning date was Maternity in a physical sense Motherhood came as a later and a rarer growth. The children of those days were not really children at all; they were only offspring, springers off, deserters from home. At one bound they were out into life on their own account, and she who beg at them knew them no more. That early world, therefore, for millions and millions of years was a bleak and loveless world. It was a world without children and a world without Mothers. It is good to realize how heartless Nature was till these arrived.

In the lower reaches of Nature, things remain still unchanged. The rule is not that the Mother ignores, but that she never sees her child. The land−crabs of the West Indies descend from their homes in the mountains once a year, march in procession to the sea, commit their eggs to the waves, and come away. The burying−beetles deposit their fragile capsules in the dead carcase of a mouse or bird, plant all together in the earth, and leave them to their fate. Myriads of other creatures are born into the world, and ordained so to be born, whose Mothers are dead before they begin to live. The moment of birth with the Ephemeridae is also the moment of death. These are not cases nevertheless where there has been no care. On the contrary, there is a solicitude for the egg of the most extreme kind for its being placed exactly in the right spot, at the right time, protected from the weather, shielded from enemies, and provided with a first supply of food. The butterfly places the eggs of its young on the very leaf which the coming caterpillar likes the most, and on the under side of the leaf, where they will be least exposed a case which illustrates in a palpable way the essential difference between Motherhood and Maternity. Maternity here, in the restricted sense of merely adequate physical care, is carried to its utmost perfection. Everything that can be done for the egg is done. Motherhood, on the other hand, is non−existent, is even an anatomical impossibility. If a butterfly could live till its egg was hatched which does not happen it would see no butterfly come out of the egg, no airy likeness of itself, but an earth−bound caterpillar. If it recognized this creature as its child, it could never play the Mother to it. The anatomical form is so different that were it starving it could not feed it, were it threatened it could not save it, nor is it possible to see any direction in which it could be of the slightest use to it. It is obvious that Nature never intended to make a Mother here; that all that she desired as yet was to perfect the first maternal instinct. And the tragedy of the situation is that on that day when its training to be a true Mother should begin, the butterfly passes out of the world.
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From:
THE LOWELL LECTURES ON THE ASCENT OF MAN
by HENRY DRUMMOND
http://www.searchengine.org.uk/ebooks/12/4.pdf