‘Male and female created He them.’ At first sight this distinction of sex appears as fundamental as that of plant and animal. Mankind, and all the higher forms of life with which mankind has relations, can only propagate their species in one way: by the co-operation of two individuals of the species, who are essentially like and yet unlike, possessing attributes which are complementary of one another, and whose union is requisite to originate a new living unit—in other words, by sexual propagation. So certain does this appear that all ancient religions and philosophies begin by assuming a male and female principle for their gods, or first guesses at the unknown first causes of the phenomena of nature. Thus Ouranos and Gaia, Heaven and Earth; Phœbus and Artemis, the Sun and Moon: are all figured by the primitive imagination as male and female; and the Spirit of God brooding over Chaos and producing the world, is only a later edition, revised according to monotheistic ideas, of the far older Chaldean legend which describes the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos by the co-operation of great gods, male and female. Even in later and more advanced religions, traces of this ineradicable tendency to assume difference of sex as the indispensable condition of the creation of new existence are found to linger and crop up in cases where they are altogether inapplicable. Thus, in the orthodox Christian creed we are taught to repeat ‘begotten, not made,’ a phrase which is absolute nonsense, or _non-sense_—that is, an instance of using words like counterfeit notes, which have no solid value of an idea behind them. For ‘begotten’ is a very definite term, which implies the conjunction of two opposite sexes to produce a new individual. Unless two deities are assumed of different sexes the statement has no possible meaning. It is a curious instance of atavism, or the way in which the qualities and ideas of remote ancestors sometimes crop up in their posterity. Science, however, makes sad havoc with this impression of sexual generation being the original and only mode of reproduction, and the microscope and dissecting knife of the naturalist introduce us to new and altogether unsuspected worlds of life. By far the larger proportion of living forms, in number at any rate, if not in size, have come into existence without the aid of sexual propagation. When we begin at the beginning, or with those Monera which are simple specks of homogeneous protoplasm, we find them multiplying by self-division. Amœba A, when it outgrows its natural size, contracts in the middle and splits into two Amœbæ, B and C, which are exactly like one another and like the original A. In fact B contains one half of its parent A, and C the other half. They each grow to the size of the original A, and then repeat the process of splitting and duplicating themselves.