y watch over their chicks, dropping their wings over some, and
letting others climb on their backs, or anywhere about them, and
clucking for joy all the time: and though they fly from dogs and dragons
when only afraid for themselves, if they are afraid for their chicks
they stand their ground and fight valiantly. Are we to suppose then that
nature has only implanted these instincts in fowls and dogs and bears,
anxious only about their offspring, to put us mortals out of countenance
and to give us a bad name? considering these examples for us to follow,
while disgrace justly attaches to our inhumanity, for mankind only is
accused of having no disinterested affection, and of not knowing how to
love except in regard to advantage. For that line is greatly admired in
the theatres, "Man loves man only for reward," and is the view of
Epicurus, who thinks that the father so loves his son, the mother her
child, children their parents. Whereas, if the brutes could understand
conversation, and if anyone were to introduce horses and cows and dogs
and birds into a common theatre,[52] and were to change the sentiment
into "neither do dogs love their pups, nor horses their foals, nor birds
their young, out of interest, but gratuitously and by nature," it would
be recognized by the affections of all of them to be a true sentiment.
Why it would be disgraceful, great God, that birth and travail and
procreation should be gratis and mere nature among the beasts, while
among mankind they should be merely mercenary transactions!

Sec. III. But such a statement is not true or worthy of credit. For as
nature, in wild growths, such as wild vines, wild figs, or wild olives,
makes the fruit imperfect and inferior to the fruit of cultivated trees,
so has she given to the brutes an imperfect affection for their kind,
one neither marked by justice nor going beyond commodity: whereas to
man, a logical and social animal, she has taught justice and law, and
honour to the gods, and building of cities, and philanthropy, and has
contributed the noble and goodly and fruitful seeds of all these in love
to one's offspring, thereby following the very first elements that are
found in the construction of the body. For nature is everywhere perfect
and artistic and complete, and, to borrow the expression of
Erasistratus, has nothing tawdry about her: but one cannot adequately
describe all the processes appertaining to birth, nor would it be
perhaps decent to pry t