men of Abyssinia," says a missionary there;
"never rest more than two or three days after child-birth," while in
luxurious Athens, where women of the higher ranks were kept alike from
physical and mental exertion, six weeks of seclusion was considered
absolutely necessary.

The German mother begins at the birth of her infant daughter to spin and
weave the linen which is to form her dowry in marriage. If all mothers
would begin to lay up for their daughters a dowry of muscular energy and
nervous strength from the time of their birth, how would the mythical
curse be removed from maternity, and the saddest of all deaths, that of
the young wife in the first child-birth, be as rare as it is in
Abyssinia.

The first requisite for the mother is to believe in a possible happy
destiny for her child, and to seek to secure it for her.

One great secret of all art, and therefore of all education, is the nice
balancing of the generic with the special or the individual. Coleridge
says "this is the true meaning of the ideal in art." False culture, by
the emphasis laid upon peculiarities of race, sex, or families, develops
these peculiarities more and more, and tends to produce monstrosities,
while nature always strives to mix the breed and restore the original
type.

Nature has her own boundaries, which she does not pass over, but they
are always delicate and nicely adjustable. When the gardener wishes
bleached celery, or seedless bananas, or monster squashes, he gives
special food in the soil of the plants, or covers them from the sun, or
nips off the spraying tendrils, that he may produce the variety he
covets, but when the farmer would raise corn or wheat for the millions,
he ploughs deep into the soil of the prairie, sows his seed broadcast,
and trusts it to the free influences of the sun and the winds, and the
harvest that he reaps is reproductive, and may be multiplied for
hundreds of years.

It is curious in tracing the progress of both vegetable and animal life
upwards towards humanity, to see how nature plays with the secondary
distinctions of sex. The great distinction always remains of the
fertilizing and the reproductive function; but as regards size, beauty,
the care of the young, and all moral and mental qualities, there is the
greatest diversity of manifestation. In some species, even, the male
builds the nest and protects the offspring from the ferocious mother,
who, like Saturn, devours her own children, and som