about in flocks, 13 or 14 females accompanied by an equal number of the sterner sex. And on a given day, all the hens lay each an egg in one nest, and one of the father birds is selected to sit upon them. And so the process goes on till all the males are sedentarily employed in hatching out their offspring. And I would ask (applying for the moment our own terminology to that wonderfully self-adaptive breed of sociologists) are not those male ostriches engaged in a thoroughly "manly" occupation? Could they be better engaged than in making the conditions of maternity as favourable and as unhampered as possible? Yet how difficult it is to make our own countrymen see that the strength of a nation lies mainly—nay, entirely—in eugenics, in sinking every other consideration for that great and central one—the perfecting of the conditions of maternity.
But let us come back for a moment to whistling. It is an accomplishment which, as a rule, men do better than women; it is the only natural treble left to them after they reach the age of puberty; and they are curiously proud of it; perhaps, because women, as a rule, have not the knack of it. Now, the real offence of a woman's whistling was not when she did it badly (for that merely flattered the male vanity) but when she did it well; and no doubt it was because some women managed to do it well that the proverb I speak of was invented. We should not have
