content to forage abroad and stand on guard when at home in the
ante-chamber of the family. When she has once been impregnated the female
animal angrily rejects the caresses she had welcomed so coquettishly
before, and even in Man the place of the father at the birth of his child
is not a notably dignified or comfortable one. Nature accords the male but
a secondary and comparatively humble place in the home, the breeding-place
of the race; he may compensate himself if he will, by seeking adventure
and renown in the world outside. The mother is the child's supreme parent,
and during the period from conception to birth the hygiene of the future
man can only be affected by influences which work through her.

Fundamental and elementary as is the fact of the predominant position of
the mother in relation to the life of the race, incontestable as it must
seem to all those who have traversed the volumes of these _Studies_ up to
the present point, it must be admitted that it has sometimes been
forgotten or ignored. In the great ages of humanity it has indeed been
accepted as a central and sacred fact. In classic Rome at one period the
house of the pregnant woman was adorned with garlands, and in Athens it
was an inviolable sanctuary where even the criminal might find shelter.
Even amid the mixed influences of the exuberantly vital times which
preceded the outburst of the Renaissance, the ideally beautiful woman, as
pictures still show, was the pregnant woman. But it has not always been
so. At the present time, for instance, there can be no doubt that we are
but beginning to emerge from a period during which this fact was often
disputed and denied, both in theory and in practice, even by women
themselves. This was notably the case both in England and America, and it
is probably owing in large part to the unfortunate infatuation which led
women in these lands to follow after masculine ideals that at the present
moment the inspirations of progress in women's movements come mainly
to-day from the women of other lands. Motherhood and the future of the