A good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters.--_English Proverb_.
The first poet, the first priest, was the first mother. The first empire was a woman and her children.--_O. T. Mason_.
When society, under the guidance of the "fathers of the church," went almost to destruction in the dark ages, it was the "mothers of the people" who saved it and set it going on the new right path. --_Zmigrodski_ (adapted).
The story of civilization is the story of the mother. --_Zmigrodski_.
One mother is more venerable than a thousand fathers. --_Laws of Manu_.
If the world were put into one scale, and my mother into the other, the world would kick the beam.--_Lord Langdale_.
In _A Song of Life_,--a book in which the topic of sex is treated with such delicate skill,--occurs this sentence: "The motherhood of mammalian life is the most sacred thing in physical existence" (120. 92), and Professor Drummond closes his _Lowell Institute Lectures on the Evolution of Man_ in the following words: "It is a fact to which too little significance has been given, that the whole work of organic nature culminates in the making of Mothers--that the animal series end with a group which even the naturalist has been forced to call the _Mammalia_. When the savage mother awoke to her first tenderness, a new creative hand was at work in the world" (36. 240). Said Henry Ward Beecher: "When God thought of Mother, he must have laughed with satisfaction, and framed it quickly,--so rich, so deep, so divine, so full of soul, power, and beauty, was the conception," and it was unto babes and sucklings that this wisdom was first revealed. From their lips first fell the sound which parents of later ages consecrated and preserved to all time. With motherhood came into the world song, religion, the thought of immortality itself; and the mother and the child, in the course of the ages, invented and preserved most of the arts and the graces of human life and human culture. In language, especially, the mother and the child have exercised a vast influence. In the names for "mother," the various races have recognized the debt they owe to her who is the "fashioner" of the child, its "nourisher" and its "nurse." An examination of the etymologies of the words for "mother" in all known languages is obviously impossible, for the last speakers and interpreters of many of the unwritten tongues of the earth are long since dead and gone. How primitive man--the first man of the race--called his mother, we can but surmise. Still, a number of interesting facts are known, and some of these follow.