What, then, so important to you, as a true knowledge and just appreciation of your relations as a husband and father? As a husband and father, you can do more to elevate and perfect the human type, and to save yourself, than you can in any other relation: political, ecclesiastical, commercial and social relations are insignificant, in comparison. I know you live but to glorify the nature you bear, and to enjoy that glorified nature forever. Such being with you the chief end of existence, I ask you to weigh, with candor and earnestness, the following observations on THE ANTE-NATAL EDUCATION AND HISTORY OF MAN. I have long been accustomed to consider human beings in connection with three states, and to think, speak and write on the comparative influence of these states on their character and destiny: 1. The state preceding birth, which I am accustomed to call the _Ante-Natal_ state. 2. The state between birth and death, or the embodied state. 3. The state after death, or the disembodied state. The two last, the _Post-Natal_ spheres or states. Religion, government, education, commerce, agriculture, mechanics, literature, the press, the convention,—these hitherto, have confined attention, almost exclusively, to human life in its post-natal spheres, embodied or disembodied. They take up human beings, _after_ they are born, and seek to do for them what they may to promote their welfare; and much of the doing consists in trying to undo what had been done for them in the ante-natal state. To a great extent, in promoting the education of children, this state has been ignored, as having no connection with the character and destiny in the post-natal spheres. Come, my friend, go with me back to that which Church and State have overlooked, and view human beings between conception and birth. The period is brief; but is it not important? Is it powerless? Are no influences exerted and no events transpiring there, of sufficient moment to render them worthy attention, in considering the history and estimating the character of the individual man or woman, or of states and nations? Many years since, the conviction was settled in my mind, that that period, though so brief, and hidden from observation in the very holy of holies of the temple of life, has more to do in giving tone to our feelings, intensity, activity and character to our passions and appetites, direction to our thoughts and plans, and in moulding our character and shaping our destiny, in the post-natal spheres of our being, than all that is brought to bear on us after we are born. OUR ANTE-NATAL HISTORY IS THE KEY TO OUR POST-NATAL LIFE. There is not a man or woman who is not a living witness to the truth of this assertion.