Perhaps there is no subject absorbing more attention at the present time than that of motherhood and heredity. Never has the cult of maternity been better formulated--never has the practice of it been more carefully studied. "In these days of pressure," writes Lyttleton, "it is a mother's first duty to her children to secure for them a full seven years of passive life." "The best and first service a mother can do her children," says another writer, "is to maintain the standard of her own life at its highest-- "'Allure to brighter worlds, and _lead the way_.'" "It is a mother's first duty to provide for each newborn soul an environment which will foster its highest development," says another. "To praise is a part of a mother's first work in the world on behalf of her children," adds a fourth. "I consider it to be the first and most important part of the education of childhood to lead them early to think" is Froebel's opinion. The importance of a mother's influence during the first few years of existence is repeated in Lord Macaulay's well-known aphorism, "Give me the first seven years of a child's life, and let who will take the rest"; and by Froebel, when he says, "The most important period of human education is before the child is seven years old." We mothers, who are God's special servants--His instruments, as it were, for the particular purpose of carrying out His will for the wee individuals confided to us--are apt to think too little about those first years of a child's life. Our children, from two to five, are often left to self-education. Very little scientific care is expended on them. Yet beauty of body and soul would not be so seldom met with, or so transient as it is apt to be with us, if we truly educated persons took our children in hand from their _babyhood_, instead of leaving them to the most ignorant class of the community. "It is usual to speak of the Greeks," writes Peabody in his "Primary School," "as if they were of exceptional organisation. Their organisation was only exceptional because it was more carefully treated in _infancy_ than ours is apt to be." "The laws which govern the growth of the human mind are as definite and as general in their application as those which apply to the material universe," and we know the basis of all development is a _good foundation_. This must be laid in early youth, both as regards the body and as regards the mind. "It is so fatally easy to do mischief" in those first seven years. The limbs of a sapling are not more easily bent than the budding desires of the infant. "The soul instinctively expects love" from the first, and only a mother's exclusively cherishing tenderness ought to be the rule in a nursery. "The true educational instinct is but the mother's instinct and method clearly understood in all its bearings and carried out intelligently."