In view of the agony which myriads of women throughout the ages of civilization have endured, it seems strange indeed that no effort should apparently have been made by the learned to understand the causes which control the individual formation of the growing structure, with a view possibly to securing some such development. In recent years, however, a little has been done in the recognition of the causes of the converse, that is to say the excessive narrowing of the pelvis to the degree where child birth is not only torment but a life and death agony. And it is now well known that this condition is associated with malnutrition and rickets in infancy and early girlhood. The little baby girl who has rickety bones (which result from being improperly fed as an infant) is, in extreme cases certain, and in many cases very likely, to have such contracted pelvic bones that when her turn comes for motherhood, the birth of a living child may be impossible by the ordinary processes of Nature. Here again, as so often is inevitable, in the course of any consideration of the profound truths of mated existence, we impinge upon the treatment of the unsound and the diseased. This _under_ development of the mother’s pelvic bones is a different problem from that evolutionary one touched on in the paragraphs above. Alas, that it should be true that the great majority of city dwellers come into the category of the spoilt and the tainted in some respect or another. But with the vision of true health and beauty as a standard before our eyes, many might escape the incipient weaknesses by consciously pursuing a standard of health, beauty and normality. It is this standard, this ideal picture, which may yet be reproduced in the lives of millions, which I desire to present in this book, so that in telling young married people some of the great facts which are ahead of them I will present only those difficulties which are inevitable, and leave to others the handling of disease. As things are to-day among British stock,[3] it is the very exceptional women who find birth an entirely easy process of which the pain is trivial, and this is chiefly due to the bony structure fixed and limited in size, which stands as a gateway of pain between the infant and the outer world, between the young wife and her motherhood. [3] In this, and in most of the generalisations found in this book, I am speaking of things as they are in Great Britain. While to a considerable extent the same is true of America and the Scandinavian countries, it must be remembered all through that I am speaking of the British, and primarily of our educated classes.