And so after the patient's last statement, "It's nothing but a mass of jelly," we began the simple but wonderfully beautiful story of the development of the "child enmothered." Just as all vegetables, fruits, nuts, flowers, and grains come from seeds sown into fertile soil, and just as these seeds receive nourishment from the soil, rain, and sunshine, so all our world of brothers and sisters, of fathers and mothers, came from tiny human seeds, and in their turn received nourishment from the peculiarly adapted stream of life, which flows in the maternal veins for the nourishment and upbuilding of the unborn embryo.
Every little girl and boy baby that comes into the world, has stored within its body, in a wonderfully organized capsule, a part of the ancestral stream of life that unceasingly has flowed down through the centuries from father to son and from mother to daughter. This "germ plasm" is a divine gift to be held in trust and carefully guarded from the odium of taint, to be handed down to the sons and daughters of the next generation. Any young man who grasps the thought that he possesses a portion of the stream of life, that he holds it in sacred trust for posterity, cannot fail to be impressed with a sense of solemn responsibility so to order his life as to be able to transmit this biologic trust to succeeding generations free from taint and disease.
THE PROCESS OF FERTILIZATION
Just as within the body of "Mother Morning Glory" (See [Fig. 18]) may be found the ovary or seed bed, so there are two wonderfully organized bodies about the size of large almonds found in the lower part of the female abdomen on either side of the uterus, and connected to it by two sensitive tubes. There ripens in one of these bodies each month a human baby-seed, which finds its way to the uterus through the little fallopian tube and is apparently lost in the debris of cells and mucus which, with the accompanying hemorrhage go to make up the menstrual flow. This continues from puberty to menopause, each gland alternatingly ripening its ovum, only to lose it in the periodical phenomenon of menstruation, which is seldom interrupted save by that still more wonderful phenomenon of conception.
At the time of conception, countless numbers of male germ-cells (sperms) are lost—only one out of the multitude of these perfectly formed sperms made up of the mosaics of hereditary depressors, determiners, and suppressors that so subtly dictate and determine the characteristics and qualifications of the on-coming individual—I repeat, only one of these wonderful sperms finds the waiting ovum ([Fig. 1]). In this search for the ovum, the sperm propels itself forward by means of its tail—for the male sperm in general appearance very much resembles the little pollywog of the rain barrel ([Fig. 1]).
The fateful meeting of the sperm and the ovum takes place usually in the upper end of one of the fallopian tubes. It is a wonderful occasion. The wide-awake, vibrating lifelike sperm plunges head first and bodily into the ovum. The tail, which has propelled this bundle of life through the many wanderings of its long and perilous journey, now no longer needed, drops off and is lost and forgotten. This union of the male and female sex cells is called "fertilization." There immediately follows the most complete blending of the two germ cells—one from the father and one from the mother—each with its peculiar individual, family, racial, and national characteristics. Here the combined determiners determine the color of the eyes, the characteristics of the hair, the texture of the skin, its color, the size of the body, the stability of the nervous system, the size of the brain, etc., while the suppressors do a similar work in the modification of this or that family or racial characteristic.
Fig. 1. Steps in Early Development.