134 FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 
It has long been a matter of common belief that 
among mammals a special formative influence is exerted 
by the mother in the period between conception and 
birth. The patriarch Jacob is reputed to have made a 
thrifty use of this influence in relation to the herds of 
his father-in-law Laban. This belief is part of the folk- 
lore of almost every race of intelligent men. In the 
translations of Carmen Silva, that gentle woman whom 
kind Nature made a poet and cruel fortune a queen, we 
find these words of a Roumanian peasant woman: 
‘* My little child is lying in the grass, 
His face is covered with the blades of grass. 
While I did bear the child, I ever watched 
The reaper work, that it might love the harvests ; 
And when the boy was born, the meadow said, 
‘This is my child.’” 
In the current literature of hysterical ethics we find 
all sorts of exhortations to mothers to do this and not 
to do that, to cherish this and avoid that on account of 
its supposed effect on the coming progeny. Long lists 
of cases have been reported illustrating the law of pre- 
natal influences. Most of these records serve only to 
induce scepticism. Many of these are mere coinci- 
dences, some are unverifiable, some grossly impossible, 
and some read like the certificates of patent medicines. 
There is an evident desire to make a case rather than 
to tell the truth. The whole matter is much in need of 
serious study, and the entire record of alleged facts 
must be set aside to make an honest beginning. 
Dr. Weismann ridicules it all and believes that all 
forms of mother’s marks, prenatal influences, and the 
like, are relics of medizeval superstition. Other authori- 
ties of equal rank, as Henry Fairfield Osborn, believe 
that these supposed influences exist and are occasional- 
ly made evident. Doubtless most of the current stories 
