young just as mama bear gives milk out of her own body to feed her cubs.
How did animals and plants come to be so much like other animals and plants; and plants and animals so much like each other in shape, in their way of growing, moving and feeding and reproducing? Why does the growth of every tree keep showing us how many different kinds of things each little seed can grow into—root, bark, leaf, blossom, fruit? One answer is that all things are related to one another, branched out from the same beginning, just as great families grow into brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts; cousins and second cousins—differing more and more, as a rule, as they are more distantly related.
Another idea is that all the great families of animals—as bees and bears, birds and fish, horses and elephants—were made different in the first place, but yet made to resemble each other in these many unexpected ways to teach us how much we can learn from one another, and do for each other.
Anyhow we can all agree that living things are much more alike than we might suppose, when we know little about them, whether we agree as to just how they got to be so much alike or not.
And we can all agree, also, that it is much better to see where we are like other people in the things we believe, instead of quarrelling over the things in which we differ from them; and that, whatever else we believe, we can be sure that we are the happiest and most useful in proportion as we live to help every other body and every other thing—if we know and feel that all living things are little brothers in the water, the earth and the air.
