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Our last talk acquainted you with the influence of the mind in preparing the bodily organs to perform their natural task and in endowing them with their ordinary suppleness — by uprooting fear from the souls of expectant mothers, strengthening their morale, spreading reassurance, and driving off the misgivings and illusions which environment, tradition, and superstition plant around the emergence of the fetus from its natural prison when its term is done and it becomes fit to see the light, and the doors of its jail open in fulfillment
of the law to which all humanity is subject. We deem it necessary here to study briefly the fetus's prison — its barriers and fortifications, its means of provisioning, the working of its outlets, and what leads to the removal of obstacles and the smoothing of difficulties before this seeker of freedom and light — so that expectant mothers may learn the facts and overcome anxiety and doubt, finding in this piece an answer to many of the questions suggested by the fetus's development while it is in the world of darkness, and the
undoing of many of the illusions that used to spread terror in a mother's heart, reinforced by ignorance and empowered by the obscurity surrounding the fetus and its formation.
Science has established that the human female ovum is so small that the naked eye is almost unable to see it, for its diameter does not exceed two microns (that is, 2 percent of a millimeter). When the man's seed fertilizes it, it attaches itself to the upper part of the body of the womb and becomes the nucleus of a living human being to come. It grows with time; by the end of the first month its length reaches four millimeters, and it is enveloped by a sac equal in size to a pigeon's egg, filled with fluid. The second month is not out before the egg becomes a fetus approaching three centimeters in length, showing a head and two legs, and drawing its nourishment through its navel by means of a cord connected to the placenta, which takes from the mother's blood the nourishment necessary for the fetus. The third month does not pass before the fetus is nine centimeters long and weighs about five grams, and the egg as a whole approaches a goose egg in size. But growth gains speed after this stage: at the end of the fourth month the fetus is eighteen centimeters in length and one hundred and twenty grams in weight; the continuous beating of its heart can be heard, and should anything occur to bring it out of its prison before its time, its sex, whether male or female, can be told. The fifth month does not close before its length reaches twenty-five centimeters and its weight two hundred and sixty grams. At the end of the sixth month its length is thirty centimeters and its weight seven hundred and fifty grams; births have taken place in this month, and the newborn has lived, as recorded in the medical annals, a normal life. At the end of the seventh month the body of the fetus becomes proportionate