The Mt. Sterling advocate. (Mt. Sterling, Ky.) 1890-current, 1921-03-31
The Origin Of Life


tunate is the one whose mother real
izes the Importance Of answering
truthfully this natural question Of
origin and Of answering it soon
enough, that is, before harmful and
ugly thoughts have been put into the
child's mind by ignorant or vicious
persons. Any mother can prepare
the way for full answer as soon as
her child is old enough to be inter-
ested in planting a seed and watch
ing it grow. If there is no out-of-
doors garden at hand, pretty way
to impart the knowledge is to plant
bean in a flower pot and interest
the child in watching its growth
from day to day.
How pleased he will be when the
bean plant begins to blossom Try
to make this blossoming important,
and thus hold his interest. Show the
little blossom to his friends and to
his playmates, or better still, en-
courage him to show it. Tell him
that he must not pick the blossom
because from it will come more
beans. How can that BET Wait
and seel If possible, place the plant
in an open window where the bees
can find the flowers.
After time, the flower will with
er and its pretty petals fall off, but
there is left behind a tiny green bean
which grew in the heart of the flow
er. Watch it become larger and
larger as the days pass. Finally,
the pod will be filled with little bean
children. Hold the plant against the
light and show the child the tiny
beans in the pod without picking it.
Each bean is attached to the pod
by tiny stem. Tell the child how
the life of the mother plant passes
into the little young beans and feeds
them and enables them to grow until
they are large enough to leave the
mother plant and start out in life for
themselves. When the young beans
are fully formed and quite ready,
the bean pod opens and the beans
fall out, and, if they fall on good
soil in time they, too, will begin to
sprout and grow into other bean
plants.
Show the child as many seeds and
seed pods as possible, those hanging
from the trees, those growing on the
plants and weeds in the garden. All
flowers grow from seeds. Every
thing that lives seems to come from
seeds. Why, yes, even the little kit
tens start as tiny seed that grew
in a place prepared for it within
its mother. We should be very care
full of the mother cat, very kind and
gentle with her and never hurt her.
Teach the child to respect mother
hood in the animals as well as in
humanity; give him lovely thought
about mothers and their young chill
dren, and thus make motherhood
beautiful and sacred in his mind.
Make the development and birth of
the infant life so familiar and so
natural to the child that when the
time comes for him to ask questions
the answers can be easily given by
the mother and easily understood by
the child who has been prepared and
who will often answer the question
himself with little help from his
mother. She night say, "You re-
member about the seeds, don't you,
and how they grew in their little
home at the heart of the floweri
You remember how we talked about
the little kittens and how they start
ed the same way as the little seedsT
The child will often ask, "And was
a little seed like that9" If not,
the moher can say, you were once
a tiny seed like that. Everybody was.
And think what a lot of growing you
did to make such a dear, big child
with hands and feet and ears and