MENTAL AND MORAL HEREDITY IN ROYALTY. 53 



(Saxe-Coburg, etc.) even in the earliest times here traced, we find 

 practically no such variation in characters. They also would have to 

 explain why in Spain and Italy in the nineteenth century, we also find 

 a variation in moral characters exactly like that found in Russia in 

 the early eighteenth or in Spain in the sixteenth centuries. 



Another aspect of the question, that is more in line with heredity 

 than environment, is the fact that variations among the children are 

 always duplicated by corresponding variations in the ancestry. This 

 is equally true of both mental and moral and indeed facial character- 

 istics. Children born of the same parents and reared in the same court 

 must usually have pretty nearly the same surroundings, yet instead 

 of their being molded to any standard type, we find that when the 

 blood is diverse in character, just about the proper proportion of chil- 

 dren show these same peculiarities both for good and bad. It is only 

 when the blood is uniformly good as in the families of Brunswick, 

 Saxe-Coburg and Sallefeld that we find unanimity in the morality of 

 the descendants. 



So that heredity appears to the writer to have exercised in mental 

 life a factor not far from nine tenths, while from the moral side it is 

 something over one half. As to anything in the nature of 'soul' or 

 ' free-will ' in the sense of a motive power lying outside of natural laws, 

 such evidence can not, of course, exclude its existence. It does, how- 

 ever, show that snch a power, if it exists at all, has only a very minor 

 influence, and even the arch argument of theology, the heroic soul 

 who tries and tries again, is found to be but the reduplication of 

 another. So it appears that the three possible factors in mental and 

 moral life are to be expressed in the following order: Heredity, En- 

 vironment, and finally, printed with the same old question mark. 

 Free-will. 



