It is the most stupendous miracle in Nature; a miracle so sacred and so tender that every man in passing an expectant mother should mentally bow the knee. Individually, socially, morally—she may be a person of but small significance. But because of the mystery of Life enshrined within her, she is a living Testament of Evolution. The pregnant woman is, moreover, pregnant with the destiny of Races.
During those ten lunar months there is enacted in the tender darkness of the mother's womb the whole wonderful drama of the Human transfiguration. With lightning swiftness, the evolving babe climbs in the footsteps that its countless ancestors had trod, in forms innumerable, along the route interminable of the Human Advent. In flashes of progressive, infinitesimal transitions, through incalculable phases and mutations, the single cell of double parentage unfolds the marvel occulted in it. Until at last, the living product stands triumphant on the topmost branch of its genealogical tree, a perfect human babe awaiting birth; the last achievement of its Race, the latest and most perfect bud of its hereditary stock.
In so far as all this occurs subconsciously within the mother, the materialist may lightly dismiss the evolutionary marvel as a "passive" form of labour. But although subconscious, these unceasing processes demand inevitably such proportional vital potential and activities on her part from whom the powers energising it are derived, as to be a continued tax and strain upon her strength and health. There are women who feel this strain but little. A rare few of these because they are so richly endowed with maternal potence that the subconscious processes have remained, as Nature doubtless intended, for the most part subconscious and painless. Far more often, however, when Maternity exacts but little from the mother, it is because she is contributing but little to the child. I have observed that the finer a child in physique and in brain, the greater the stress and disability the mother had suffered prior to its birth.
VI
Indifferent, notwithstanding, to all the vital activities and psychical evolutions taking place within the mysterious laboratory of the mother's body; reckless of the circumstance that any interference with, or hampering of the least of these must inevitably jar, and warp, the delicate complexes of infantine development, we scruple not to strain and burden, to harass and deplete, the prospective mother even further by strenuous breadwinning. Her whole physiology and psychology are profoundly altered by her momentous condition; by the new adjustments to the needs of the developing babe, of the maternal circulation and digestion, assimilation and elimination, mentality and intricate nervous constitution and processes. Fatigue, noise, turmoil, effort, shock—any one or all of these which are inseparable from industrial employment—cannot but injuriously re-act upon the delicate evolutions mysteriously occurring in her.
The infant brain is complete at birth. From its lowest to its highest departments, all the marvel of exquisitely-delicate construction and association of its complex cells is achieved pre-natally. And according or not as her vital powers have been rich and otherwise unexpended, and according or not as the embryological processes of development have occurred in quietude and freedom from strain upon the mother's part, will be the quality for life, in vigour and in sanity, of her child's intelligence and character.
VII
In view of those lower biological grades through which the embryo passes before arriving at the human stage, it is inevitable that maternal over-fatigue, shock or undue effort may arrest its physical development temporarily upon any of these lower levels. And such arrest must inevitably entail some warp or bias of a lower animal phase; which may so impress itself permanently on embryonic development as to detract more or less gravely from the final transition.
It is, doubtless, for this reason that many modern humans show in their configuration, degrees of reversion to ape, sheep, fish and other lower species.