In the ultimate days, when human multiplication has done its work—when man has become so populous that every square foot of ground upon the known earth shall be covered by a man—the law of evolution will no doubt have eradicated many of the present marriage laws and customs, based upon a false public opinion, and the generation of the species will no doubt be conducted along more advanced and scientific lines. For the next few centuries, however, judging the future by the past, the marriage relation will continue in the same crude and unscientific condition that has controled it for the past five thousand years, so we need not now concern ourselves about any “devastating torrent” of children, but leave this vexed problem for succeeding centuries. In the meantime, like visionary things, mere motes, the atoms known as human beings, will continue to be brought into the world, as a result of the unnatural laws and customs governing this natural relation, “Still wondering how the marvel came, because two coupling mammals chose, To slake the thirst of fleshy love.” Tossed into the “giant grasp of Life, like gale-borne dust, or wind-wrung spray,” the son of man will continue to be “the toy, the sport, the waif and stray of passions, error, wrath and fear.” Empires have perished and nations have risen during the period covered by the foregoing pages. Countless millions of human beings have lived their little lives, with their tincture of lust; tasted, for a brief space, the “joy in an armful of beautiful dust,” as a result of the relation established by the laws and customs treated of in these pages, and then “step by step, perforce, returned” to “couthless youth, wan, white and cold, Lisping again the broken words, till all the tale be fully told.” And thus, for successive ages to come, will the “moving row of magic shadow shapes,” continue to come and go “Round with the sun-illumined-lantern held, in Midnight, by the Master of the Show.” FOOTNOTES: [1] Institutiones Justinianus, written 527-529, A. D. [2] Ringrose “Marriage Laws of the World,” p. 10. [3] Tylor, “Early History of Mankind;” McLennan’s “Primitive Marriage.” [4] McLennan’s “Primitive Marriage;” Ringrose, “Marriage Laws of the World,” p. 7. [5] Tacitus, Germania, c. 18; II. Pollock and Maitland’s History English Law, 364; Johns’ “Babylonian and Assyrian Laws,” etc. [6] We are told that this rude custom obtains today in “Far Cathay,” Blackwood’s Magazine, July-Dec., 1887, vol. 42, p. 671.