During the ante-natal months of this miraculous Ascent, the embryo "climbs its genealogical tree," as biologists style it. That is to say, it passes, in turn, through all the countless evolutionary phases of all the countless evolutionary ages whereof Humanity is the culminating product. Fashioning out of formlessness, slowly it attains to form. Shaping, shaping, ever marvellously shaping, it evolves, in succession, through fish, amphibian and other rudimentary life-grades. Climbing, climbing, ever marvellously climbing, day by day, to nobler heights, it is transformed at last to human shape; lower human first, then higher human, and finally to the highest human possible to its stock, its parentage, and the resources, physical and psychical, available to it. It is the most stupendous miracle in Nature; a miracle so sacred and so tender that every man in passing an expectant mother should mentally bow the knee. Individually, socially, morally--she may be a person of but small significance. But because of the mystery of Life enshrined within her, she is a living Testament of Evolution. The pregnant woman is, moreover, pregnant with the destiny of Races. During those ten lunar months there is enacted in the tender darkness of the mother's womb the whole wonderful drama of the Human transfiguration. With lightning swiftness, the evolving babe climbs in the footsteps that its countless ancestors had trod, in forms innumerable, along the route interminable of the Human Advent. In flashes of progressive, infinitesimal transitions, through incalculable phases and mutations, the single cell of double parentage unfolds the marvel occulted in it. Until at last, the living product stands triumphant on the topmost branch of its genealogical tree, a perfect human babe awaiting birth; the last achievement of its Race, the latest and most perfect bud of its hereditary stock. In so far as all this occurs subconsciously within the mother, the materialist may lightly dismiss the evolutionary marvel as a "passive" form of labour. But although subconscious, these unceasing processes demand inevitably such proportional vital potential and activities on her part from whom the powers energising it are derived, as to be a continued tax and strain upon her strength and health. There are women who feel this strain but little. A rare few of these because they are so richly endowed with maternal potence that the subconscious processes have remained, as Nature doubtless intended, for the most part subconscious and painless. Far more often, however, when Maternity exacts but little from the mother, _it is because she is contributing but little to the child_. I have observed that the finer a child in physique and in brain, the greater the stress and disability the mother had suffered prior to its birth. VI