That Darwin gave the true explanation of a great many of the alleged cases is perfectly clear to us. When the child is born with any peculiar characteristic, the mother hunts for some experience in the preceding months that might explain it. If she succeeds in finding any experience of her own at all resembling in its effects the effect which the infant shows, she considers she has proved causation, has established a good case of prenatal influence. It is not causation; it is coincidence. If the prospective mother plays or sings a great deal, with the idea of giving her child a musical endowment, and the child actually turns out to have musical talent, the mother at once recalls her yearning that such might be the case; her assiduous practice which she hoped would be of benefit to her child. She immediately decides that it did benefit him, and she becomes a convinced witness to the belief in prenatal culture. Has she not herself demonstrated it? She has not. But if she would examine the child's heredity, she would probably find a taste for music running in the germ-plasm. Her study and practice had not the slightest effect on this hereditary disposition; it is equally certain that the child would have been born with a taste for music if its mother had devoted eight hours a day for nine months to cultivating thoughts of hatred for the musical profession and repugnance for everything that possesses rhythm or harmony. It necessarily follows, then, that attempts to influence the inherent nature of the child, physically or mentally, through "prenatal culture," are doomed to disappointment. The child develops along the lines of the potentialities which existed in the two germ-cells that united to become its origin. The course of its development can not be changed in any specific way by any corresponding act or attitude of its mother, good hygiene alone need be her concern. It must necessarily follow that attempts to improve the race on a large scale, by the general adoption of prenatal culture as an instrument of eugenics, are useless. Indeed, the logical implication of the teaching is the reverse of eugenic. It would give a woman reason to think she might marry a man whose heredity was most objectionable, and yet, by prenatal culture, save her children from paying the inevitable penalty of this weak heritage. The world has long shuddered over the future of the girl who marries a man to reform him; but think what it means to the future of the race if a superior girl, armed with correspondence school lessons in prenatal culture, marries a man to reform his children! Those who practice this doctrine are doomed to disillusion. The time they spend on prenatal culture is not cultivating the child; it is merely perpetuating a fallacy. Not only is their time thus spent wasted, but worse, for they might have employed it in ways that really would have benefited the child--in open-air exercise, for instance. To recapitulate, the facts are: