In the well-conducted home, for example, a study of individual character must in the future replace cast-iron discipline or easy-going, child-spoiling indulgence. The fact that the early cultivation of good habits makes for healthful happiness must be generally appreciated; and the duty of the home to provide opportunity for the exercise of personal tastes, the importance of training as a relief to nervous strain and as the best means to develop resource and skill, must be perceived. It will be by this constant understanding supervision in early years, and later by the cultivation of an intimate sympathetic comradeship with his children, that the modern parent will retain for his country the cementing force of family life. IX. THE MEANING OF INFANCY The great discovery of John Fiske as to the reasons for the long continuance of childhood in man must not be overlooked in this connection; it bears so directly on health and efficiency, and is closely associated with the importance of the family to the individual as well as to the nation. Why, it may be asked, is man's period of helplessness so prolonged; why, when his brain development reaches so high a standard, is he for years in a position of entire dependence, whereas snakelet and chick are practically self-supporting from the hour of hatching? When the lower forms of animal life are compared with mankind, the non-existence in their case of any such stage as infancy is at once apparent. They are brought into the world able to take care of themselves and to live an independent individual existence. Young pigs run almost as soon as they are born, young swallows fly directly they are fledged. Now, if the structure of lower animals be examined, it will be found that they have no central warehouse corresponding to the human brain for the storage of new sensations or for an elaborate and original response to them. Each such animal repeats the life of its parents; each responds in exactly the same way to the contact of air, of earth, of food, or of water. Their activities, it is true, are distinguished by accuracy and despatch, but the offspring of a hen of the twentieth century has no larger capacity for the variation of these activities than has the chick which was hatched out six thousand years ago. The guinea-pig of to-day, for example, remains mentally at the level of his thousandth ancestor. Wherein then lies the difference between the pig and the baby?