I think it cannot be doubted, that much of the physical disease and suffering, and much of the idiocy, insanity, and mental and moral obliquity of our post-natal, embodied state, is the result of our ante-natal organization. Much, indeed, is done for us before the germs of our being leave the _paternal_ organism. They must, to a greater or less extent, receive the impress of the father’s conditions of body and soul; and he will do a service to the world who shall show to fathers their responsibilities in this matter. But _Maternity_ is the subject under consideration; and in discussing this, my concern with the germ is after the mother takes charge of it. _The period between conception and birth_ is that to which I would call your attention. From a long and critical observation of facts, and a persevering effort to trace the physical, intellectual, social and spiritual conditions and phenomena of the individual and social lives of children and adults, in the many thousands of families in which, for a longer or shorter time, I have been an inmate, I long ago came to the conclusion, that to their ANTE-NATAL EDUCATION, men and women are more beholden for their healthful or diseased physical conditions, sufferings or enjoyments, and for their mental and spiritual tendencies, their peculiarities of temper and disposition, their aptitudes to truth or falsehood, to justice or injustice, to love or hate, to peace or war, to temperance or drunkenness, to forgiveness or revenge, to sexual purity or impurity, to happiness or misery, than to all the influences that are brought to bear on them, after they are born, to whatever age they may attain. These tendencies, whether of body or soul, are mainly, if not entirely, organized as fixed facts of existence in the individual man or woman, in their ante-natal state. There is not a human being, there never was one, and never will be, whose whole life is not essentially, constantly, and in its minutest details instigated and directed, more or less, by gestational influences. If this be so, where are we to look for the forming and controlling causes of human character and destiny, and of physical, mental, and spiritual idiosyncrasies? Where shall we go to find the true foundations of biography and history, and the controlling elements of all religions and governments? Where go to find the mainsprings of war, slavery, drunkenness, polygamy, licentiousness, and of all the sufferings, anguish and woes of marriage and domestic life, that arise from the abuse of the sexual element? Where go to find the cause of a repulsive and loathed maternity, and of the horrors to which it leads? Where, indeed, but to the germs of diseases, and the aptitudes to good or evil, that were organized into the bodies and souls of men and women, as fixed facts and elements of life, by influences that were brought to bear upon them, through the maternal organism, between the periods of conception and birth?