MENTAL PREPARATION. 191 



and means to accomplish desired ends in me- 

 chanics, business, books, science, and art. 



If prospective parents will habitually exercise 

 the reasoning and inventive powers, especially 

 if the mother will give attention to logic, phi- 

 losophy, mechanics and the relation of cause to 

 effect during the latter part of the maternal per- 

 iod, usually the offspring will have a fair de- 

 gree of inventive talent and originality, even 

 where these qualities are deficient in the parents. 

 When there is considerable natural talent or 

 where there are latent inventive powers, constant 

 training on the part of the parents will usually 

 give the offspring exceptional powers in this di- 

 rection. 



To illustrate: A man who came from an in- 

 ventive family, who was not a mechanic, under- 

 took to produce a mechanical invention, and 

 worked on it for two years prior to the birth 

 of his son. During gestation the mother became 

 much interested in the invention and entered 

 heartily into the study with him. The boy born ^ ^^ ditvof 

 under these circumstances began his inventions an Inventor, 

 before the age of ten. At twenty-five he had 

 produced over twenty original inventions and 

 double as many improvements, several of which 

 have paid well. That this inventive genius and 

 originality of mind were largely the result of 

 prenatal training is proved by the fact that the 

 older children show very little mechanical in- 

 genuity and scarcely a trace of originality, while 

 children born after the inventive son, show more 

 inventive talent than the older ones, but have 



