PRENATAL AND INFANTILE CULTURE. 39 



the moral dispositions and of the so-called innate ideas. The man- 

 agers of the world " from behind the screens " know this, for it is at 

 this time that they impose on plebeian women pilgrimages and ec- 

 static "nove7ias" 1 and keep those of a higher class under more strin- 

 gent impressions. Here, in Vienna, for instance, from the time of the 

 Emperor Charles V. till quite recently, when an heir to the throne 

 was expected, the empress was given in charge of a special director, 

 who would regulate all her actions and surroundings, in view of com- 

 mencing the course of submissive education of the contingent mon- 

 arch, as early as the first evolution from the yolk-substance of the 

 human egg during embryogenesis. Similar influence is now claimed 

 for an object diametrically opposed to the degeneracy thus arrived at 

 in the house of Hapsburg. It can be attained by counsels printed 

 either in book-form or on scrolls, as are the sentences of the Koran. 

 But, whatever may be the form given to this magna charta of the 

 rights of the unborn, let it be found precisely where these rights 

 ought to be kept most sacred, in the nursery ; where their enforce- 

 ment would protect the mother and elevate her function, at the same 

 time that it would insure her fruit against the decay resulting from 

 wrong prenatal impressions. 



We know that a cold contact with the mother makes the foetus fly 

 to the antipode of its narrow berth ; that a rude shcck may destroy 

 it, or originate life-long infirmities ; that, the emotion of fear in the 

 mother is terror or fits within ; that harsh words vibrate as sensibly 

 in the liquor of the amnion as in the fluid of the labyrinth of the ear. 

 For instance, when a mother has lulled her home-sorrows with strains 

 of soothing music, her child, too often an idiot, shows wonderful mu- 

 sical proclivities amid the wreck of all the other faculties of his mind. 

 For thirty-five years the writer has furnished his share of the facts, 

 which abound in modern books on physiology, in support of this 

 doctrine. 



It is useless to give here the illustrations detailed in the report ; 

 but experienced physicians will testify that, when their hands receive 

 a new-comer, they plainly read upon his features the dominant feel- 

 ings and emotions of its mother during that intra-uterine education 

 whose imprints trace the channel of future sympathies and abilities. 

 Therefore, if it is noble work to educate or to cure the insane, the 

 idiot, the hemiplegic, the epileptic, and the choreic, how much higher 

 is the work of preventing these degeneracies in the incipient being, 

 by averting those commotions which storm him in the holy region in- 

 tended for a terrestrial paradise during the period of evolution ! To 

 teach him reverence toward the bearer of his race, to instruct her in 

 the sacredness of bland and serene feelings during the Godlike cre- 

 ative process, is educating two generations at once this is the high- 

 est education of the nursery. 



1 A nine days' season of prayer. 



