Reproduction carries life beyond the individual. Haeckel has said that the process is nothing more than the growth of the organism beyond its individual mass. But this process in the higher forms of life has become exceedingly complex. All living beings are individual in one respect and composite in another, for the inheritance of each individual is a mosaic of ancestral contributions. Galton's _Law of Inheritance_ makes this abundantly clear. Briefly stated, the law is as follows: The two parents of each living being contribute _on the average_ one-half of each inherited quality, each of them contributing one-quarter of it. The four grand-parents furnish between them one-quarter, or each of them one-sixteenth; and so on backwards through past generations of ancestors. Now, though, of course, these numbers are purely arbitrary, applying only to averages, and rarely true exactly of individual cases, where the prepotency of any one ancestor may, and often does, upset the balance of the contributions made by the other ancestors, it may certainly be accepted as the most probable theory that biology has given us to explain the difficult problem of Nature--that is the inheritance we receive from our ancestors. We see that the heredity relation is an extremely complex affair. It is not merely dual from the parents; but it is multiple, through them reaching back to the grand-parents, great-grand-parents, great-great-grand-parents, and so on backwards indefinitely. It is, indeed, a mosaic of many, yes, of uncountable, contributions. The Life Force gathering within itself these multiple sets of heredity contributions is like capital ever growing at compound interest. The importance of this is abundantly clear. For as we come to understand the continuity of our inheritance from generation to generation we realise more vividly how the past has a living hand on and in the present, and how that present will be carried on to the future. We are all links in the one mighty Chain of Life, and on us, and upon women especially, rests a high responsibility. We must hand on our past inheritance unimpaired, so that the new link forged by us may strengthen and not weaken the chain. It is the duty of every woman as a potential mother of men to choose a fitting father for her children, having first educated herself for a freer and more capable maternity. In the past she has done this blindly, following the Life Force without understanding, or hindered from her purpose by the artificial conditions of society. In the future such blindness and such failure of her powers will alike be regarded as sin. With full knowledge, woman will fulfil her great central purpose of breeding the race--ay, breeding it to heights now deemed impossible, not dreamt of even by those of us who look forward through the darkness to the clear sunlight of that time when the sex relation shall be freed from economic pressure and from all coercion of a false morality, and the