For a long time it has seemed to him suspicious that Nature, who is so uniform in her methods and who with such unfailing consistency has made all vital functions pleasant, should have made this one conspicuous exception, particularly in regard to a function linked to the most vital moment in our lives. Being unsatisfied with the verdict of science on the subject, therefore, he made inquiries on his own account, and was not at all surprised to find, not only that a number of existing races still enjoy infinitely greater ease in parturition than most European women, but also that, as he expected, there are still to be found among mankind faint vestiges of that ecstasy which he believes must once have attended the function in normal circumstances. Even the dreams of some European women lead the inquirer to suspect the existence of this ecstasy not so very far back along the racial line. When, however, the present writer expressed this view in a recent work dealing with the subject,[8] he provoked the most violent indignation, particularly among women themselves. Footnote 8: See _Woman: A Vindication_ (Constable and Co.: 1923). After having made a number of observations and experiments on the higher animals, he discovered not only that parturition is in fact ecstatic among these animals when in their natural condition, but also that their ecstasy can quickly be altered to anguish by only the smallest divergence from the normal in their food during gestation. Observing animals in a state of nature, moreover, he arrived at this interesting conclusion, _that their young_, even when the mothers are in splendid fettle, _are only skin and bone at birth_, that their birth is an ecstatic function to the mother only when they are in this state, and that young born in this way not only never lose weight, but grow as plump and vigorous as could be wished in the first twenty-four hours. If, however, the gestating mother’s food be so modified _as to make it unlike the natural food of the species_—for instance, if large quantities of potatoes, bread, cabbage, and rice-pudding be given to a female cat, with rations of cooked instead of raw meat—the birth of the kittens, which are grossly fat, is immensely difficult, and some of them may be still-born or appear only after long delay in mutilated fragments. The present writer has confirmed these facts repeatedly, and they led him to ask this question: _whether civilized women, even in antiquity, have not habitually taken the wrong food during gestation, with the result that their babies have been too fat or too hard in the bone at birth_?