The extensive rôle of the mother, as a teacher of the practical arts of life, may be seen from the book of Professor Mason (113). Language, religion, the social arts, house-building, skin-dressing, weaving, spinning, animal-domestication, agriculture, are, with divers primitive peoples, since they have in great part originated with her, or been promoted chiefly by her efforts, left to woman as teacher and instructor, and well has the mother done her work all over the globe. The function of the mother as priestess--for woman has been the preserver, as, to so large an extent, she has been the creator, of religion--has been exercised age after age, and among people after people. Henry Ward Beecher has said: "Every mother is a priestess ordained by God Himself," and Professor Mason enlarges the same thought: "Scarcely has the infant mind begun to think, ere this perpetual priestess lights the fires of reverence and keeps them ever burning, like a faithful vestal" (112. 12). Though women and mothers have often been excluded from the public or the secret ceremonials and observations of religion, the household in primitive and in modern times has been the temple, of whose _penetralia_ they alone have been the ministers. _Imitation._ Tarde, in his monograph on the "Laws of Imitation," has shown the great influence exerted among peoples of all races, of all grades and forms of culture, by imitation, conscious or unconscious,--a factor of the highest importance even at the present day and among those communities of men most advanced and progressive. Speaking a little too broadly, perhaps, he says (541. 15):-- "All the resemblances, of social origin, noticed in the social world are the direct or indirect result of imitation in all its forms,--custom, fashion, sympathy, obedience, instruction, education, naive or deliberate imitation. Hence the excellence of that modern method which explains doctrines or institutions by their history. This tendency can only be generalized. Great inventors and great geniuses do sometimes stumble upon the same thing together, but these coincidences are very rare. And when they do really occur, they always have their origin in a fund of common instruction upon which, independent of one another, the two authors of the same invention have drawn; and this fund consists of a mass of traditions of the past, of experiments, rude or more or less arranged, and transmitted imitatively by language, the great vehicle of all imitations."