"I certainly do. In the first place, it has to learn, one by one, and by repeated experiments, its body. You do not realize now that you had to learn, one by one, and by repeated experiments, every one of the muscular movements that you can now make without thinking of them. You remember what hard work it was to learn the piano and that was only learning to use a very few muscles in a certain way. As a baby you had to practice hours a day before you could learn to hold anything in your fingers. Your little hands flew about very wildly at first, but by constant practice you gained skill at last." "Why, mamma, I never thought that a baby was practicing when it was throwing its hands about." "But it is practicing, and it keeps it up hour after hour, day after day, until it has learned to hold things, to pull itself up, to sit up, to hold its head up, to creep, to walk, to climb. "Have you any idea what a wonderful feat has been accomplished when a baby has learned to walk? Physiologists tell us that walking is continually beginning to fall and perpetual recovery from falling. It is a greater thing for the baby than those acrobatic feats which so amazed you the other day. "Then the mental education begins also at birth. The baby is building his brain by everything he sees and does, and it is the mother's duty to see that this brain-building goes on in accordance with the law of his nature. Every baby is a new being with a nature of his own, and what was good for his brother may not be good for him. The training that will give one child self-confidence will make a little tyrant of another; what would render one merely amenable to control might make a coward of another. So you see, my dear, that a mother needs to have great knowledge of the laws of mind and great insight in the applying of those laws to the particular cases she has in hand." "It really seems, mamma, as if girls ought to study all those things before they marry." "Indeed they ought, but I fear they never will until they come to have a clearer idea of the value and importance of the mother's work. When they realize that the great and lasting work of the world is done in the homes, by the mothers, with their little children, then we shall have men demanding that girls shall be prepared for that important work by previous education. "There is another way, too, in which women are given great power over the destiny of the world, and that is through heredity." "What does that word mean, mother? I have heard it very often, but people speak as if it were something undesirable." "Heredity means the passing on of traits or talents from parents to children. Now, your eyes are like papa's. They are a part of your heredity from him. You have other features like him, and you have many of his traits. It has been easy to teach you to be orderly because you have inherited his love of order. Then, too, you have many of my characteristics. My hair, my love of music, my quick temper."