and the laws of life in their analyses. An institution like marriage is criticized by those who think that it is an ecclesiastical invention of yesterday, and that what hands have made, hands can destroy, though marriage is aeons older even than the mammalian order. They take transient, artificial conditions, lasting not for a second in the history of mankind seen as a whole, and simply accepting these conditions as part of the order of nature, they ask us to overthrow an institution which is immeasurable ages older than man himself. The odds are somewhat against them, one may surmise, but they may do considerable injury to their own age notwithstanding. After having dealt with this fundamental biological condition of marriage, we must next turn to a psychological question which is scarcely less important. The human being is immensely complex both in composition and in needs, and the institution of monogamy does not become easier of maintenance as human complexity increases. Amongst the lower animals or even amongst the lower races of mankind, the relations between the sexes are mostly confined to one sphere, but amongst ourselves the problem is to mate for life complex individuals whose needs are many, ranging from the purely physical to the purely psychical. Thus it is a matter of common experience that whilst one woman meets one part of a man's needs, another meets another, and this of course with grave prejudice to monogamy. Some of the modern writers to whom allusion has been made suggest that these different needs want sorting out; that one woman is to be the intellectual companion of a man, and another the mother of his children. But though men and women are multiple and complex, they are in the last resort unities. These absolute distinctions between one need and another do not work out in practice. Anything which tends toward splitting up the human personality must be a disservice to it. Nor do we desire that women of the higher type, best fitted to be the intellectual companions of men, shall be those who do not contribute to the future of the race. From the eugenic point of view the mother is every whit as important as the father. I do not believe for a moment that these more or less definite proposals of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells are soundly based, and perhaps indeed it is not necessary to argue against them at greater length. Of more value is it to ask ourselves whether feminine nature may not prove itself quite equal to the task of meeting all the needs of masculine nature. It seems to me that the right answer, in many cases at any rate, to the wife's question, how is she to retain the whole of her husband's interest, is hinted at in Mr. Somerset Maugham's recent play "Penelope"--she must be many women to him herself. And this the wise and happy woman is, though I do not think the phrase "many women" at all covers the variety of feeling to which the ideal woman can appeal.