It has been said upon excellent authority that Napoleon's mother read Roman history with absorbing interest during the months preceding his birth. Think of the nations and the centuries influenced by that one woman's mental concentration! The geography of the world was changed by her power of focused thought. In all probability Napoleon's mother did not know what she was doing; she was not conscious of the destiny her mind was shaping for her unborn child, nor of the law governing such conditions. Women have been strangely ignorant of this vital truth; until recent years it has not been considered a "proper" theme for tongue or pen, and to-day the great majority of young women marry absolutely uninformed upon the subject of prenatal influence. Men are equally oblivious of any knowledge regarding the matter, and consequently make no special effort to keep the expectant mother of their offspring happy, hopeful, or free of anxiety and worry during this period. Often they do not strive to aid them in their own attempts to bestow a desirable temperament upon the unborn child, but heedlessly and needlessly aggravate or grieve the mind which is stamping its impress upon an unborn soul. It is just here that the "New Thought" can perform its greatest miracles of good. Even the woman who has not been enlightened upon the law of ante-birth-influence will, if a true disciple of the Religion of Right-living, bring healthy and helpful children into the world, because her normal state of mind will be inclusive of those three qualities; and her continued and repeated assertions of her own divine nature will shape the brain of her child in optimistic and reverential mould. There is the old law of the continual falling of the drop of water upon the stone to be verified in the spiritual plane. Continual assertions of a mother that her child will be all that she desires it to be, will wear away the stone of inherited tendencies, and bring into physical being a malleable nature wholly amenable to the after influences and efforts she may bring to bear upon it. It is a tremendous responsibility which rests upon the woman who knows she is to be a mother of a human being. A hundred ancestors may have contributed certain qualities to that invisible and formless atom which contains an immortal soul, yet the mother's mind has the power to remake and rebuild all those characteristics, and to place over them her own dominating impulse, whether for good or ill. Surely, if success in the arts or the sciences is worthy of years of devoted attention and interested effort, the moulding of a noble human being is worth eight or nine months of concentrated thought and unflagging zeal of purpose.