on. There is hardly a
case of defect or monstrosity where the cause is supposed to be due to
maternal impression, which cannot be explained in some natural way, or
simply by accident. Thousands of women are frightened or shocked by
disagreeable sights, by crippled men, by animals, and still their
children are born perfectly normal. On the other hand, many marked, or
defective, or monstrous children are born in which no maternal
impressions can be given as the cause. So why can it not happen when
the mother was frightened by something during her pregnancy, and the
child was born with some mark or defect, that the latter was simply an
accident and not the _result_ of the impression? Because a thing
_follows_ another thing it does not mean that it was _caused_ by that
other thing.

Many of the cases given as examples, and by physicians too, are so
ridiculous that no scientific man can give them the slightest credence
for one moment. When a physician (Dr. Thomas J. Savage) tells us that
he attended a lady who had been frightened by a large green frog at or
about the middle of pregnancy, and that she gave birth to a
monstrosity, the head of which was that of a large frog in shape, with
the eyes and mouth and even the coloring of a frog, then he is either
telling an untruth, or he shows himself as ignorant and credulous as
any illiterate old woman can be. The doctor should know that at the
middle of pregnancy the child is _fully formed_ and that there is no
possibility of an already formed human being changing its shape into
that of an animal. Another example given by the same doctor, and
showing the calibre of his mentality, is that of a child which, when
an infant, not old enough to walk, "would crawl over the floor and
pick up little objects such as pins, tacks, small beads, without the
slightest difficulty or fumbling." The reason for this "remarkable"
skill the good doctor ascribes to the fact that four months before the
birth of this child the mother had an outing in the woods and had
derived great enjoyment from gathering hickory nuts which she found
scattered among the leaves with which the ground was thickly covered!

Very often the so-called shock or fright which the mother experiences
during gestation is simply a product of her imagination. We know of
many cases where the mothers never mentioned that anything happened
to them, and only after the child was born with some kind of mark or
defect they began to hunt f