SOPHEREUS. I confess I did not expect to hear you go quite so far. I will yield all the potency to natural and sexual selection that can be fairly claimed for them as modifying agencies operating after the sexual division has come about; but I have, I repeat, seen no facts which justify the hypothesis that they have led to distinct organisms between which no propagation can take place. But now you expect me to accept the startling conclusion that at some time the asexual or the unisexual method of reproduction passed into the bisexual, without any formative will or design of a creating power, and without any act of direct creation. We know what Plato imagined as the origin of the sexual division, and that he could not get along without the intervention of the gods. What modern naturalist has done any better? I have examined Darwin's works pretty diligently, and I can not get from them any solution of the origin of the bisexual division. I am left to reason upon it as I best can. We know, then, that in the higher animal organisms the individuals of each species are divided into the related forms of male and female, and that for each species there exists the one invariable method of the sexual union, and a law of gestation peculiar to itself. One hypothesis is that this system was produced by the operation of natural causes, like those which are supposed to have differentiated the various kinds of organisms; the other hypothesis is that it was introduced with special design, by an act of some creative will. If we view the phenomena of the sexual division and the sexual genesis in the highest animal in which they obtain, we find that they lead to certain social results, which plainly indicate that in this animal they exist for a great and comprehensive moral purpose, which far transcends all that can be imagined as the moral purpose for which they exist in the other animals. To a comparatively very limited extent, certain social consequences flow from the law of sexual division and genesis among the other animals. But there is no animal in which the moral and social effects of this law are to be compared to those which it produces in the human race. Not only does the same law of multiplication obtain among the human race; not only does it lead to love of the offspring far more durable and powerful than in the case of any other animal; not only is it the origin of a society far more complex, more lasting, and more varied in its conditions than any that can be discovered in the associations of other animals which appear to have some social habits and to form themselves into communities, but in the human race alone, so far as we have any means of knowledge, has the passion of sexual love become refined into a sentiment. You may remember the passage in the "Paradise Lost" in which Raphael, in his conversation with Adam, touches so finely the distinction between sexual love in the human race and in all the other animals. The angel