Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/835

Rh mother on her offspring, and belief in it is still very prevalent among women themselves, of all classes. Women alone are able to speak or feel in this matter from experience, and the almost universal belief in the influence, among those who have any experience at all, should make us hesitate to discard it too summarily. From facts within my own personal knowledge I have long believed in this influence, and the more I have been able to collect reliable data bearing upon it, the more confirmed have I become in the conclusion that the emotional experiences of the mother affect the issue in varying degree, according to the intensity of the emotion. When sudden and excessive, as in rage, fright, repugnance, etc., or where prolonged or accumulative, as in continued brooding, it may induce nervous disorders, and even mental aberration, idiocy, or insanity; or, again, physiological change, as atrophy or increase of parts, and other peculiarities which have relation to the form or character of the inducing mental manifestation or shock in the parent. Investigation of this, as of all subtle phenomena, is attended with the difficulty of separating the chaff of fancy from the grain of reality. The method pursued by Darwin is unsatisfactory, as it dealt with normal conditions which furnish no evidence and with the fanciful or notional side of the subject. The literature of the subject is extensive and quite interesting, and I would refer particularly to the work and writings of Viellard, Schönfeld, Demangeon, Lucas, Féré, and Brown-Séquard. Two other difficulties confront the investigator: first, the somewhat unsatisfactory state of neurology and the difficulty of experimental research therein, as indicated by Vice-President Bowditch before this section two years ago; secondly, the aversion, from feelings of delicacy, on the part of the persons concerned, to publicity of the more marked and striking evidence. The phenomena of hypnotism, proving as they do that physiological results may be induced through the imagination of the subject acted on by the mind of the hypnotizer, are suggestive in this connection, the work of Charcot in Paris more particularly showing how powerful the action may be, and how the effects of actual medicines may be produced by the use of imagined ones. The mind of the hypnotized under these conditions is brought into those exceptional and exalted conditions which are necessary in the case of the mother to produce on her offspring the effect which we are discussing. The recent experiments of Mr. C. T. Hodge on the effects of stimulation on the nucleus and cell-body and on protoplasm are also interesting here, showing, as they do, decrease in the two former and vacuolation of the latter as the result.

The history of science is present to tell us that common and persistent belief, based on experience, has not infrequently been