The humble squaw who drops corn in her stick-ploughed field is actuated by a concept, a knowledge of how in time there will be fruit for her children. There is no present stimulus, she pushes herself, urged by the accumulating nerve force of the larger brain. Her lord, the noble Red-man, gallantly pursuing the buffalo, is acting merely as an animal, under direct stimulus of hunger and the visible beast before him. Being hungry, he hunts. Being fed, he does nothing. He can only act in the lower circuit of excito-motory nerves. But she, not hungry, makes the corn grow. She makes the tent. She makes the moccasins and leggings and beaded belt. She makes the dish and basket. She, first on earth, works, and she works for others. First, it was only this mother energy, producing for its young; the same power which finds its apotheosis in the sublime matriarchate of the bee. Work was primarily an extension of the maternal function; and, carried to excess, results in that ultra-perfection of specialised maternity, the ever-bearing queen-mother, the ever-toiling worker-mother, and the contemptible, well-nigh useless, barely tolerated, and soon slaughtered drone-father. But human work was saved this hopeless limitation of maternity by being forced upon the male, and by him specialised and distributed. To work and save is feminine, tending to the swollen hive, the sacrificed male. We still see this tendency among us in that long-aborted social rudiment, the home. But man, assuming the industrial function, applied to it his disseminating energy, spread, scattered, specialised, and so made possible our social life. If the bees had been led to our great economic manœuvre, the motherising of the male, they might be more than hymenoptera to-day. Work, as an ever-elaborating discharge of energy, tends to develop under laws of inertia, like all natural processes. The “tendency to vary” in action is checked in the short circuit of individual animal activities by the immediate consequence of his own variation to the individual. This wonderful new step of ours, the production of food, gave us a new base for variation. A low grade of effort, by a few persons, kept us fed, alive. Our early specialisation in social defence kept us protected, alive. Being thus assured of life, though not on the basis of individual exertion, we acquired time to manifest new activities. Here is one of the great keys to “the mystery of human life,” no more a mystery than any of nature’s laws, when you know it. A social life is assured by the basic industry, agriculture, and some degree of trade and commerce. Then the energy no longer required by each man for each day’s living can be given to invention, discovery, experiment. So follows all the immensity of our growth.