follow that attempts to improve the race on a large
scale, by the general adoption of prenatal culture as an instrument of
eugenics, are useless.

Indeed, the logical implication of the teaching is the reverse of
eugenic. It would give a woman reason to think she might marry a man
whose heredity was most objectionable, and yet, by prenatal culture,
save her children from paying the inevitable penalty of this weak
heritage. The world has long shuddered over the future of the girl who
marries a man to reform him; but think what it means to the future of
the race if a superior girl, armed with correspondence school lessons in
prenatal culture, marries a man to reform his children!

Those who practice this doctrine are doomed to disillusion. The time
they spend on prenatal culture is not cultivating the child; it is
merely perpetuating a fallacy. Not only is their time thus spent
wasted, but worse, for they might have employed it in ways that really
would have benefited the child--in open-air exercise, for instance.

To recapitulate, the facts are:

(1) That there is, before birth, no connection between mother and child,
by which impressions on the mother's mind or body could be transmitted
to the child's mind or body.

(2) That in most cases the marks or defects whose origin is attributed
to maternal impression, must necessarily have been complete long before
the incident occurred which the mother, after the child's birth,
ascribes as the cause.

(3) That these phenomena usually do not occur when they are, and by
hypothesis ought to be, expected. The explanations are found after the
event, and that is regarded as causation which is really coincidence.

Pre-natal care as a euthenic measure is of course not only legitimate
but urgent. The embryo derives its entire nourishment from the mother;
and its development depends wholly on its supply of nourishment.
Anything which affects the supply of nourishment will affect the embryo
in a general, not a particular way. If the mother's mental and physical
condition be good, the supply of nourishment to the embryo is likely to
be good, and development will be normal. If, on the other hand, the
mother is constantly harassed by fear or hatred, her physical health
will suffer, she will be unable properly to nourish her developing
offspring, and it may be its poor physical condition when born,
indicates this.

Further, if the mother experiences a great mental or physical shock,