PRENATAL INFLUENCES 



What We Know of Them Gives No Ground for Making Them a Basis of 



Eugenic Teaching Propaganda Must Be Kept on Absolutely Sound 



Scientific Basis Unless It Is to Result in 



More Harm Than Good. 



David Starr Jordan, 

 Chancellor of Leland Stanford Junior University, California. 



IT HAS been said that "the trans- 

 mission of the sacred torch of hered- 

 ity undimmcd to future generations 

 is the most precious of all worths 

 or values in the world." 



Accci)ting this statement from some 

 unknown writer as a substantial fact, 

 we may derive from it the enormous 

 value to the world of all facts which 

 bear on the question of Eugenics, the 

 art by which sound parentage may be 

 granted to the next generation. Every 

 fact relating to human heredity is a 

 precious fact. The aim of the Eugenics 

 movement is to make these facts mat- 

 ters of common knowledge as the 

 multiplication table is. This requires 

 a great deal of time and practice. It is 

 the work of teachers, and its methods 

 should be methods of science, not of 

 emotion. 



Because the facts of Eugenics arc so 

 incalculably precious, it is necessary 

 that their purity be guarded. To mix 

 up what scientific men really know with 

 what emotional people vaguely guess is 

 to destroy the value of the whole. 

 There are a great many things about 

 heredity and inheritance yet to be dis- 

 covered. There are many questions to 

 which we do not know the answer 

 until we find it out. 



Many of these relate to the relation 

 of external conditions, maternal im- 

 pressions and the like, to the unborn 

 child. The occasion of writing these 

 lines is the reception of a number of a 

 journal which, with the best of in- 

 tentions, "holds as chief of the means 

 to be used the i^ower of the parents to 

 determine i)re-natally the character of 

 their children." 



In otlicr words, it places above 

 actual knowledge of actual fact, a piece 

 of spurious science, partly based on old 

 wives' tales and partly on disconnected 

 facts connected with the wholesomeness 

 of clean living. 



" MATERNAL IMPRESSIONS." 



What can parents do to determine 

 before birth the character of the child? 

 Nothing, so far as we know, except so 

 to live that the germ cells are not en- 

 feebled, and the foetus checked in its 

 period of quiet nutrition. Most of the 

 stories of prenatal influences are pure 

 fables. No child was ever bom with 

 a dog's face, because its mother was 

 scared by a dog. No child ever ac- 

 quired gift of song, because its mother 

 yearned for music, nor because she 

 saturated her life with melody. The 

 child may be harmed, no doubt, by all 

 kinds of unsanitary life, by hysteria 

 most likely as well as by drugs. But 

 the injury is not rendered in kind — so 

 much liquor, so much tendency to 

 drink — but in reducing as it were the 

 momentum of child life. 



The experiments of Dr. Charles R. 

 Stockard and others have shown that 

 germ cells may be actually weakened or 

 destroyed b>' the use of alcohol. Prc- 

 sumal)ly defective genns would mean 

 defective growth, a matter not of hered- 

 ity but of development. Apjjarently 

 many cases of mental and jjhysical 

 distortion have their origin in alcoholic 

 deterioration of germ cells. This line 

 of study opens a large field in which no 

 very great progress has yet l)cen made. 

 It does onlv mischief to assume that we 



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