ly
to convey favorable impressions, but also to guard against unfavorable ones
being made, upon the mind of the pregnant woman.

3. HANKERING AFTER GIN.--A certain mother while pregnant, longed for gin,
which could not be gotten; and her child cried incessantly for six weeks
till gin was given it, which it eagerly clutched and drank with ravenous
greediness, stopped crying, and became healthy.

4. BEGIN TO EDUCATE CHILDREN AT CONCEPTION, and continue during their
entire carriage. Yet maternal study, of little account before the sixth,
after it, is most promotive of talents; which, next to goodness are the
father's joy and the mother's pride. What pains are taken after they are
born, to render them prodigies of learning, by the best of schools and
teachers from their third year; whereas their mother's study, three months
before their birth, would improve their intellects infinitely more.

5. MOTHERS, DOES GOD THUS PUT the endowment of your darlings into your
moulding power? Then tremble in view of its necessary responsibilities, and
learn how to wield them for their and your temporal and eternal happiness.
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6. QUALITIES OF THE MIND.--The qualities of the mind are perhaps as much
liable to hereditary transmission as bodily configuration.

[Illustration]

Memory, intelligence, judgment, imagination, passions, diseases, and what
is usually called genius, are often very markedly traced in the
offspring.--I have known mental impressions forcibly impressed upon the
offspring at the time of conception, as concomitant of some peculiar
eccentricity, idiosyncracy, morbidness, waywardness, irritability, or
proclivity of either one or both parents.

7. THE PLASTIC BRAIN.--The plastic brain of the foetus is prompt to receive
all impressions. It retains them, and they become the characteristics of
the child and the man. Low spirits, violent passions, irritability,
frivolity, in the pregnant woman, leave indelible marks on the unborn
child.

8. FORMATION OF CHARACTER.--I believe that pre-natal influences may do as
much in the formation of character as all the education that can come
after, and that mothers may, in a measure, "will," what that influence
shall be, and that, as knowledge on the subject increases, it will be more
and more under their control. In that, as in everything else, things that
would be possible with one mother would not be with another, and measures
that would be successful with one would produce op