ave--why?"

"Well, then, does every male animal have a stamen and every female an
ovary?"

"Certainly darling! And let me repeat that the products of the two
must be mingled in order to bring forth little animals. That is just
what I am going to tell you about today."

"And do you mean, mamma, that honey in the plants grows into love in
the animals?" Elsie asked, her eyes very wide.

"Oh, that is a very beautiful thought for my little girl to have!"
Mrs. Edson exclaimed, smoothing Elsie's hair lovingly. "And, yes, that
is the truth, put very poetically. Love is sweet, like the honey that
it replaces--at least it is for us human beings. Probably with the
animals it is not of just the same quality that it is with us, for
they do not act as if it were, but at least the animals are an
improvement on the plants in this respect, and the love that they feel
for each other finally evolves, in us, to become the sweet thing that
we find it to be."

"Isn't that lovely--and so strange!" exclaimed Elsie.

"Yes, darling, it is lovely, and very strange. There are various kinds
of love, as well as various degrees of the same kind, but this is a
subject a little too deep for us to take up just yet. What I wish now
is to teach you how the animals marry. And I will begin by saying that
all forms of reproduction, which is the name given to having
children, follow the same principle. The animals marry in a way that
is only a variation of the plant way, and men and women marry in a way
that is a variation of the plant and animal ways. But let us begin
right, with the first appearance of life on earth."

"Yes, mamma," Elsie cried eagerly. "But the _first_ life! That must
have been very, very long ago, wasn't it?"

"It was so far back in the history of the world that we can scarcely
more than guess how long ago it must have been. We do not even know
where it first appeared or just how it came to be. Some scientists
believe that it occurred at the mouth of the Nile River, in Africa, in
the rich soil that the river deposits there when it overflows its
banks. Others think it was in the sea, or along the shores of some
ocean in a tropical country. But we need not go into that here. What
we do know is that the hot sun, shining on a certain spot on the earth
or sea, which was just in the right condition, produced the first body
containing life that the globe ever had, and that this body was only a
little speck of jelly-like substance, whic