"Yet it shall be; thou shalt lower to his level day by day, What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay. As the husband is the wife is; thou art mated with a clown, And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down. He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse."
Darwin, on the other hand, considers it a most improbable hypothesis that the mere blood of one individual should affect the reproductive organs of another individual in such a manner as to affect the subsequent offspring. The analogy, he says, from the direct action of the foreign pollen on the ovaries and seed coats of the mother plant strongly supports the belief that the male element acts directly on the reproductive organs of the female, and not through the intervention of the crossed embryo.
Dr. John Brown, in reviewing the subject, says it must be conceded that the male element has an influence on the female, over and above its fertilizing influence upon the ovum. The limit of this influence is at present unknown.
Heredity.-- Girls are more apt to resemble their fathers in mental traits, disposition, and constitution; while boys take after their mothers. Boys procreated by intelligent mothers will be intelligent; while it does not always follow that the sons of intelligent fathers are intelligent. The poets Burns, Ben Johnson, Goethe, Walter Scott, Byron, and Lamartine were all born of women remarkable for vivacity and brilliance of language.
Hygiene of Pregnancy.-- The health and perfection of the child depend largely upon the health and perfection of the parents at the time of its conception, as well as upon the condition of the mother during the pregnancy. Even when both parents possess a strong constitution, but one or both of them is suffering from a temporary exhaustion or malaise, the child will be born below the standard of health it ought to possess. Children born during the first year of married life seldom equal in health the children born of the same parents later; they are not only apt to be sickly, but the liability to premature death is greatly increased. For this reason it is better that the first year of married life should be allowed to pass without conception taking place. A child begotten in an intoxicated or depraved condition of a parent may be depraved itself in the same way, and is apt to be feeble-minded or idiotic.