The like is true of nearly every species. The males protect the females. Even the gorilla, savage and most terrible of beasts, lies at night on guard beneath the tree in which his mate and offspring sleep. If need arise, he fights to the death in their defence.
With regard to the chivalrous devotion of male-birds, Olive Schreiner thus comments in Woman and Labour (an example of that I have ventured to describe as the "impassioned fallacy" hurtling round the Woman Question): "Along the line of bird-life and among certain of its species, sex has attained its highest æsthetic, and one might almost say intellectual, development on earth ... represents the realisation of the highest sexual ideal which haunts humanity."
(This however, less, I fear, to accredit the male-sex with chivalry than to discredit the human male by ornithological comparison!)
* * * * *
One does not profess that such protective rôle of males—beast and bird and crab—is the outcome of sentiment. It is instinctive, subconscious. Nature's purpose being to preserve and to perpetuate species, she achieves this by safeguarding the female. The province of the male in reproduction is but slight and brief. It exacts so little from him as to interfere not at all with those other masculine activities which are the function of his sex.
Whereas, as Professor Lester Ward says, "Woman [and the female of all species] is the Race." Out of her blood and bone and vital powers she evolves and fashions it, nurtures and ministers to it.
III
For the preservation of species, two rôles are essential: the Male rôle of Combat, demanding strength and boldness, resource and fighting-quality, in order to protect and provide for the female and offspring; and the Female rôle of Devotion and Self-surrender, in order to nurture offspring ante-natally, and, after birth, to nurture and to tend its helplessness.
Now all but biologists, perhaps, take it as matter-of-course that Love had its origin in Sex.