PARENTAL LOVE A PHYSICAL INSTINCT.
Of course, all must admit that there is supposed to be something higher in modern marriages than mere physical love. There is at times a love so intense, so exalted, that it is akin to the worship a religious enthusiast is supposed to extend to God; but all this great love is made possible by the previous existence of intense physical love. If marriage could be based on reverential respect, or any other regard that has no physical aspect, man and man, or woman and woman, could marry with the same felicity and propriety that the sexes are now mated. But the mere thought of uniting marriage with such conditions is repugnant—and rightly so. But is it necessarily a disgrace for marriage to be founded on physical attraction? One of the most admirable traits in the human character is the love of a mother for her child, and the reader may be shocked when we say that such regard is mere animal or physical love; for the grandest exhibition of the sacrificial spirit of parental love can be found among the lower animals. An animal that is as timid as a hare, under ordin-
