The wonderful story of life : a mother's talks with her daughter regarding life and its reproduction / reprinted by the British Social Hygiene Council ... by permission of the United States Public Health Service.

  • United States Public Health Service
Date:
[1933]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The wonderful story of life : a mother's talks with her daughter regarding life and its reproduction / reprinted by the British Social Hygiene Council ... by permission of the United States Public Health Service. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    into itself something from the father. You have been told how plants are fertilized when the pollen, which is the father part, is carried to the pistil of the flower by the bee, and travels down through it to the little growing seeds or eggs which are produced by the mother part. You have heard of the father salmon that swims hundreds of miles in order to pour his milt upon some salmon eggs left by the mother salmon. You have seen birds loving one another, and have been told that at times a little stream of life-giving fluid passes from one to the other as they do so. This fluid contains the little wriggling bodies which fertilize the eggs so that they will grow and produce baby fish and baby birds. The eggs of the salmon and the birds hatch outside of the mother’s body. Mammals are animals like cows and dogs and cats and human beings, which carry their young in their bodies, sheltered and nourished deep in the mother until they are born. For that reason it is necessary that a life-giving body, like the little wriggling things in the milt of the fish, be placed by the father in the body of the mother, where it will have a good chance to find the egg in the place provided for it. And, wonderful to tell, human fathers and mothers, and the fathers and mothers of other mammals, are so made that this is possible. The father makes the egg within the body of the mother fertile. Then, in the safe nest which has been made there, the egg grows and develops until it is strong enough to live in the air. When the little animal comes out of the mother nest, we say it is born. When a man and woman love one another very much, and each thinks the other the dearest and [22]
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