10.  CONCLUSION.—­Would you, then, secure the love and trust of your wife, and become an object of her ever-growing tenderness and reverence?  Assure her, by all your manifestations, and your perfect respect for the functions of her nature, that your passion shall be in subjection of her wishes.  It is not enough that you have secured in her heart respect for your spiritual and intellectual manhood.  To maintain your self-respect in your relations with her, to perfect your growth and happiness as a husband, you must cause your physical nature to be tenderly cherished and reverenced by her in all the sacred intimacies of home.  No matter how much she reverences your intellectual or your social power, if by reason of your uncalled-for passional manifestations you have made your physical manhood disagreeable, how can you, in her presence, preserve a sense of manly pride and dignity as a husband?

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HEALTH AND DISEASE.

Heredity and the Transmission of Diseases.

1.  BAD HABITS.—­It is known that the girl who marries the man with bad habits, is, in a measure, responsible for the evil tendencies which these habits have created in the children; and young people are constantly warned of the danger in marrying when they know they come from families troubled with chronic diseases or insanity.  To be sure the warnings have had little effect thus far in preventing such marriages, and it is doubtful whether they will, unless the prophecy of an extremist writing for one of our periodicals comes to pass—­that the time is not far distant when such marriages will be a crime punishable by law.

2.  TENDENCY IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION.—­That there is a tendency in the right direction must be admitted, and is perhaps most clearly shown in some of the articles on prison reform.  Many of them strongly urge the necessity of preventive work as the truest economy, and some go so far as to say that if the present human knowledge of the laws of heredity were acted upon for a generation, reformatory measures would be rendered unnecessary.

3.  SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES.—­The mother who has ruined her health by late hours, highly-spiced food, and general carelessness in regard to hygienic laws, and the father who is the slave of questionable habits, will be very sure to have children either mentally or morally inferior to what they might otherwise have had a right to expect.  But the prenatal influences may be such that evils arising from such may be modified to a great degree.

4.  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 the mother 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 opposite results from the other.