=Marked her child twice.=--About the close of a lecture in one of the Central Western states, a lady asked me to call at the Cash Store, explaining that she wanted an hour’s interview with me. I found her to be a lady of extremely susceptible temperament, refined and cultured, but a bundle of nerves. She was the mother of three little nervous children. Before calling in her oldest child, which she had marked twice, she explained her experience. She said, “In our early marriage we owned a cow that we were very proud of. Husband and I had often wished that she were dehorned. One morning my husband’s brother secretly dehorned her. The servant boy finding it out ran to the house and urged me to go out to the barn and see what had occurred. When I rushed suddenly upon the scene, I seized the fingers of the right hand with the left and screamed. There were several large clear blisters on the cow’s head. When my little girl was born the index finger of the right hand was off at the second joint, the other three fingers were entirely absent and several blisters had to be removed by the physician. “During the second or third month of gestation I was told that one of the neighbors had given birth to a child with one foot turned entirely around. My curiosity led me to go over and see the child. When our girl was born her left foot was turned completely around, the toes pointing backwards. We have spent sixteen hundred dollars trying to have the foot turned back. We have succeeded only in a small measure.” Then she said, “I never heard of birthmarks until after my child was born. If I could have heard your series of lectures, it would have been worth a fortune to me. I believe this misfortune could and would have been avoided.” The reader must not conclude that these pathetic cases are common. They are not. The cases cited here represent fully one-half of the extreme cases that I have personally studied during years of travel and lecturing. They forcefully illustrate the possibilities of maternal impressions on the forming child. CHAPTER L HEREDITY, ENVIRONMENT AND REDEMPTION [Illustration: HEREDITY CHART OF EMMA W.]