Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/112

 Behold the fourteen miles of blood-vessels, and the five hundred miles of nervous filament, every one of which is an electric telegraph a million times more perfect than that of Morse! Behold the skin that covers the human form, with its forty-five millions of pores, through which is hourly sifted noxious substances too fine to be seen by the human eye! The human eye itself! What microscope can rival it? What telescope compare in elaborateness and use? The ear ! What a wonderful instrument! Behold the mystery of the hand and arm ! Look at the astonishing perfectness of the wheels, levers, hinges, doors, cells, wells, pumps, and pillars of the human structure, and you are lost in amazement at its extraordinary and marvellous workmanship! Yet it is all fashioned and completed in the uterus of woman! Nor is this all. When we look at the human body, with all its wondrous workmanship, we realize the stupendous truth that it was created especially as the temporary residence of the eternally enduring human soul. And that soul itself, with all its transcendent powers for good and evil, is fashioned, biased, built up and modelled for all eternity, within its holy walls, from whence it is launched upon the waves of eternal ages; and its destiny here and hereafter unquestionably is determined before it sees the light, by the happy or unhappy, sick or well, condition of the mother whose work it chances to be! In Heaven's name, then, how can we expect wives to bring forth children but a little inferior to angels in perfection, while the mothers are in some respects treated inconsiderately, rudely, and ignorantly, like unto the beasts that perish? Now observe: whatever sensation, emotion, pleasure, or pain the woman has, be it mental or physical, immediately acts upon the uterus, and its appendages, causing either pleasurable, healthful feelings to pervade her entire being, or inducing pain. But if, from cramped or diseased lungs, the blood be impure and charged with noxious substances, there is sure to be trouble, either in the uterine, digestive, or nervous system, but mainly in the former, and manifested by weakness in the back and loins, nervous irritability, sickness, nausea, side-pains, headaches, and impure catamenia, — not unfrequently ultimating in ulcers, cancer, or confirmed consumption. Frequently the uterine ligaments become weak, relaxed, flimsy, and suffer the uterus to fall forward, backward, descend, or become partially turned inside out; and if it become bruised while thus