There is no doubt as to the big fact that in the course of evolution animals have shown an increasing complexity and masterfulness of behaviour, that they have become at once more controlled and more definitely free agents, and that the inner aspect of the behaviour--experimenting, learning, thinking, feeling, and willing--has come to count for more and more. Sec. 3 Evolution of Parental Care Mammals furnish a crowning instance of a trend of evolution which expresses itself at many levels--the tendency to bring forth the young at a well-advanced stage and to an increase of parental care associated with a decrease in the number of offspring. There is a British starfish called _Luidia_ which has two hundred millions of eggs in a year, and there are said to be several millions of eggs in conger-eels and some other fishes. These illustrate the spawning method of solving the problem of survival. Some animals are naturally prolific, and the number of eggs which they sow broadcast in the waters allows for enormous infantile mortality and obviates any necessity for parental care. But some other creatures, by nature less prolific, have found an entirely different solution of the problem. They practise parental care and they secure survival with greatly economised reproduction. This is a trend of evolution particularly characteristic of the higher animals. So much so that Herbert Spencer formulated the generalisation that the size and frequency of the animal family is inverse ratio to the degree of evolution to which the animal has attained. Now there are many different methods of parental care which secure the safety of the young, and one of these is called viviparity. The young ones are not liberated from the parent until they are relatively well advanced and more or less able to look after themselves. This gives the young a good send-off in life, and their chances of death are greatly reduced. In other words, the animals that have varied in the direction of economised reproduction may keep their foothold in the struggle for existence if they have varied at the same time in the direction of parental care. In other cases it may have worked the other way round. In the interesting archaic animal called _Peripatus_, which has to face a modern world too severe for it, one of the methods of meeting the environing difficulties is the retention of the offspring for many months within the mother, so that it is born a fully-formed creature. There are only a few offspring at a time, and, although there are exceptional cases like the summer green-flies, which are very prolific though viviparous, the general rule is that viviparity is associated with a very small family. The case of flowering plants stands by itself, for although they illustrate a kind of viviparity, the seed being embryos, an individual plant may have a large number of flowers and therefore a huge family.