Note (return) — THE ADVENTITIOUS CHARACTER OF WOMAN

When, in the course of time, sexual reproduction eventuated in a mammalian type, with greater intimacy between mother and offspring and a longer period of dependence of offspring on the mother, the function of the male in assisting the female became social as well as biological; and this was pre-eminently so in the case of man, because of the pre-eminent helplessness of the human child.256 The characteristic helplessness of the child, which at first thought appears to be a disadvantage, is in fact the source of human superiority, since the design of nature in providing this condition of helplessness is to afford a lapse of time sufficient for the growth of the very complex mechanism, the human brain, which, along with free hands, is the medium through which man begins that reaction on his environment—inventing, exterminating, cultivating, domesticating, organizing—which ends in his supremacy.