EVIDENCE PKOVING THE STATEMENT OF THE CASE 103 



The child is non-intelligent, helpless, soulless. Now 

 commences a beautiful process in Nature showing how 

 the loving care of the mother further develops the 

 structure of the child. All her efforts are to feed it, to 

 teach it the use of its inherent growing powers, of its 

 senses as they grow to teach it to speak and to 

 walk. For the born infant is perfectly incapable of 

 reason. All its actions are reflex. It has no mind no 

 soul. Give it some object to suck and it will suck it 

 just the same as it sucks the mother's nipple. Even 

 when it gets older it has no fear, it would as soon 

 fall from the heights of the cliff as it would tumble 

 off a footstool. This is, indeed, one ' of the mother's 

 anxious cares. As the various cells increase and their 

 secretions increase (always derived from food and the 

 air), or as we commonly call it, as the child grows, tiie 

 growing forces inherent in the cells are brought into 

 play by the parent. Perfectly intuitively she is arrang- 

 ing the cells and their activities in their proper order. 

 She teaches the child to use its hands, to respond to 

 certain sounds. She teaches it a language. It is per- 

 fectly indifferent to the child what language it may be. 

 It is capable of being educated in the narrow prejudices 

 of any nation. All these and the thousand and one 

 endearing actions of the mother are simply guiding the 

 molecular alterations in the child, and in a most marked 

 way those alterations which go on in the brain. She is 

 educating her child. 1 And thus from infancy to school 



is practically a temporary ecto-parasite upon the unfailing maternal 

 . . . surplus." (" The Evolution of Sex," Prof. Geddes and J. A. 

 Thomson, 1889, p. 245.) 



1 " It is because the body is a machine that education is possible 

 Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial 



