2.  EVIDENCES.—­Many evidences are found in ancient history, especially among the refined nations, showing that certain expedients were resorted to by which their females, during the period of utero-gestation, were surrounded by the superior refinements of the age, with the hope of thus making upon them impressions which should have the effect of communicating certain desired qualities to the offspring.  For this reason apartments were adorned with statuary and paintings, and special pains were taken not only 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.  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, idiosyncrasy, 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 opposite results from the other.