224 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



better of a generation of healthy, ignorant, and happy mothers, who 

 can produce stalwart, forceful sons and daughters (not that I wish this 

 lecture to be an apology for health and ignorance), but the world 

 must be worse for a system of stopping full and harmonious develop- 

 ment in the mothers of the next generation. My plea is, that as Na- 

 ture is harmonious in mental and bodily development, we should follow 

 on her lines, and not set up an educational standard for ourselves that 

 is one-sided, because it takes no proper account of the constitution of 

 the body and brain at all, only considering one brain-function — the 

 mental. 



Along with these developments of mind and emotion during ado- 

 lescence there are, unfortunately, too apt to develop hereditary weak- 

 nesses, especially of the nervous kind. Physicians then meet with 

 hysteria, neuralgia, nervous exhaustion, insanity, etc., for the first 

 time. As normal individualities of bodily form and mental character 

 then arise, so abnormal developments arise too where they are in- 

 herited or brought on by unfavorable treatment. This law is found 

 to prevail in human constitutions : if you give Nature a good chance 

 by specially favorable conditions, and by counteractive measures early 

 in life, she tends to eradicate evil hereditary tendencies, and to return 

 to a healthy type, if the evil has not gone too far in the ancestry or in 

 the individual. Unfortunately, there are very few families indeed, 

 nowadays, free from tendencies to some hereditary disease or other. 

 Our modern life tends to develop the brain and nervous system, and 

 undue development means risk of disease always. "What the profes- 

 sion of medicine specially desires to guard our population now against, 

 is our becoming a nervous race. We want to have body as well as 

 mind ; otherwise we think that degeneration of the race is inevitable. 

 And, therefore, we rather would err on the safe side, and keep the 

 mental part of the human machine back a little, while we would en- 

 courage bulk, and fat, and bone, and muscular strength. We think 

 this gives a greater chance of health and happiness to the individual, 

 and infinitely more chance of permanence and improvement to the 

 race. This applies to the female sex, we think, more than to the male. 

 Man's chief work is more related to the present (from a physiological 

 point of view), woman's chief work to the future of the world. Why 

 should we spoil a good mother by making an ordinary grammarian ? 



It will be said, as an hereditary fact, that most great men haVe had 

 mothers of strong minds. I believe this to be true, but it is not a 

 fact that many great men have had what would now be called "highly- 

 educated " mothers. On the contrary, very few such men have had 

 such mothers. There were usually an innate force and a good devel- 

 opment of mind and body in the mothers of such men, who usually 

 had led quiet, uneventful, unexciting lives. I am inclined to believe 

 that if the mothers of such men had been in adolescence worked in 

 learning book-knowledge for eight or ten hours a day in a sitting pos- 



