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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    will, as far as we can see, still be the same. It does not grow at all. The pile of sand in which you and your friends play changes only because you dig holes in it; the sand itself does not change. But flowers and trees, and fishes, and you yourself, Helen Elizabeth, are never quite the same one day as you are the next. Yesterday you were not as big a girl as you are to-day, and you are not as big to-day as you will be to-morrow. We human beings grow from childhood to youth and from youth to womanhood, and then we gradually _ grow old and finally die. All living things, plants and animals, do the same. Since all living things change and finally die, it is necessary always that new plants and animals be created to take their places. If new plants, fishes, birds, animals, and people were not con- stantly produced, the earth would soon be left without any. In a short time it would all be a vast desert without a living thing on it; no plants, fishes, birds, animals, or men. Now, this does not happen, because all living © things multiply or repeat themselves in their off- spring. Every kind of plant, every kind of animal in the world has the power to produce baby plants and baby animals like itself. The grass makes or brings forth new grass ; the oak tree new oaks ; the pretty violets and all the other flowers, new flower plants ; the chickens, little chicks ; cattle, their calves; dogs, their puppies; and people, their babies. How they do this is a wonderfully interesting story. I am going to tell you about it—tell you how the flowers make the new little plants which will produce flowers next year; how the fishes [7]