to their gardens, waved them over the flowers of the
date-palm. Why they performed this ceremony they did not know; but
they knew that if they neglected it the date-crop would be poor or
wholly lost. But the true reason is now explained. Palm-trees,
like human beings, are male and female. The garden plants, the date
bearers, were females, the desert plants were males; and the waving
of the branches over the females meant the transference of the
pollen dust from the one to the other."[18]

From these two elements, the spermatozoa, or male element, and the ova,
or female element, all life, except in the lowest organisms, is
produced.

You could point out how it is by this marvellous process of
reproduction, not only that the world is made green and beautiful, but
all animal life is fed. Corn and rice, which are only fertilized seeds,
form the staple food of a large proportion of mankind; while even the
animal in order to live has first to be nourished on corn or grass
before it can become meat for man.

You could go on further to illustrate the facts of reproduction by bees
and ants, so familiar to children, where the drone or male bee, or the
male ant, in just the same way as in the plant, fertilizes the eggs of
the queen bee or ant by bringing the spermatozoa into contact with the
unfertilized egg in the insect's body, when the eggs thus fertilized are
laid and carefully nurtured by the working bee or ant. All children have
observed the little neuter,[19] or working ant, carrying in its
mandibles an egg almost as large as itself with an air of extreme hurry
and absorption, to lay it in the sun till the warmth hatches it into a
baby ant.

If it were further pointed out that not the male, but the female, as the
mother of the species, is Nature's chief care; that among ants the male
is sent into the world so imperfectly endowed that he cannot even feed
himself, but is fed by his female relations, and that as soon as he has
performed his function of fertilizing the queen ant, Nature apparently
dismisses him with contemptuous starvation; or--to take the case of the
drone or male bee--he is stung to death by the workers, it might help to
modify the preposterous pretensions of the male, especially of the boy,
in higher circles.

You could then pass upwards through fish with the soft and hard roe, or
male and female elements which are familiar to children, and through
frogs with their s