While to contrast with it and apparently to refute my thesis, there may be a mother full of the most ardent hopes and buoyant spirit, looking forward with supreme joy to the advent of her baby, doing all she can to give it every beautiful mental impression and physical health, whose work may yet be undone by some cruel chance, such as venereal infection, or some local malformation which has resulted in weakness in, let us say, the child’s digestion. We all know how peevish mere indigestion will make anybody. Or she, the well-intentioned and outwardly well-circumstanced mother may, unknown to herself, have been battling against the cruel handicap in some racial, heritable defect in her husband; the child, therefore, may, with all her efforts, yet fail to be joyous owing to the too strong physical bias which chance or heritable disease has given it. The existence of such apparently conflicting and contradictory individual instances in no way refutes my main thesis, which is that granted equal conditions of clean and wholesome ancestry, granted equally favourable conditions of health and nutrition for the mother during her period of carrying the child, that that child benefits and is superior to the other who has had the advantage of a happy mother’s conscious effort to transmit to it a wide and generally intellectual and spiritual interest in the great and beautiful things of the world. This fact is often illustrated in the different children of the same parents. Of children born under as nearly identical circumstances as may be possible within a year or two of time, the one may have a totally different disposition with totally different qualities from the other. The chance of birth, the inheritance of the innumerable possible characteristics latent in both parents might be sufficient to account for this were chance alone at work, but very often information may be obtained from the observant mother which correlates her own state while carrying the child with the after condition of the child itself. One rather striking instance of such a correlation is by a curious chance known to me, and should be of general interest. Oscar Wilde, whose genius was sullied by terrible sex crimes, which he expiated in prison, is known to all the world as a type whose distressing perversion is a racial loss. His mother once confided to an old friend that all the time she was carrying her son Oscar, she was intensely and passionately desiring a daughter, visualizing a girl, and, so far as was possible, using all the intensity of purpose which she possessed to have a girl, and that she often in after years blamed herself bitterly, because she felt that possibly his perverted proclivities were due to some influence she might have had upon him while his tiny body was being moulded.