Entered, according to act of Congress, in the year 1848, by O. S. FOWLER, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York. Mar 13 30 Hughes 6182 F82m. PREFACE. THAT the various states of the mother's mind and body, before the birth of offspring, go far toward determining their health or debility, amiableness or ill nature, intelligence or stupidity, and all their other mental characteristics, is a momentous truth which all prospective mothers should fully understand, and which renders child-bearing inconceivably momentous in its influence on human destiny. To the eluci dation and enforcement of this eventful law of nature, this work is devoted. It teaches mothers what regimen and conditions, in them, will secure the best constituted children; shows how to provide beforehand for a safe and easy delivery; teaches husbands what duties they owe their wives during pregnancy and nursing; gives directions respecting infantile. regimen, and the early habits and management of children;. and, last but not least, it shows how to prepare girls to bear a far higher order of children, as well as how to rear them after they are borne; that is, it shows how to fit them for the great function of the female, namely, CHILD-BEARING and REARING. It moreover, in doing this, analyzes female beauty. In short, it reflects upon this whole subject the sunlight of Phrenology, Physiology, and Magnetism; and as such, supplies a connecting link between the author's other works on man's social relations. Thus, his "Matrimony" treats SELECTION, COURTSHIP, and MARRIED life phrenologically; his "Hereditary Descent" applies the laws of transmission to the perfection of the ORIGINAL CONSTITUTION of offspring, by showing what unions will produce the most highly endowed germs of humanity; while his "Love and Parentage" teaches husbands and wives into what states of mind and body they should throw themselves in order to stamp the highest order of mental and physical organization upon prospective offspring, or how to PA |