i 9 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



are so frequently produced in families in which the practice of those 

 arts and sciences is familiar. The same aptitude may be shared by 

 several members of the family, who will remain in the secondary rank, 

 while a single one rises above them all. It is the aptitude, not genius, 

 that is hereditary, while Mr. Galton has constantly confounded the 

 two. In the other orders of invention, as in poetry and eloquence, 

 there is nothing inconsistent with a solitary instance of genius being 

 produced in a family that does not seem to have been prepared for it. 

 The preparatory training, the special aptitude, are less necessary in 

 them. It is enough if the national language has reached a degree of 

 clearness and vigor in which it can give perfect expression. Gener- 

 ally, the great writer blossoms out alone. He seems to appear, an 

 unexpected phenomenon, in a succession of modest generations, the 

 uniform course of which he breaks at a blow. Sometimes similar 

 aptitudes may be found among other members of the family, but the 

 fact is without significance or consequences. Bossuet, Pascal, Moliere, 

 Yoltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Byron, and Goethe, however we may 

 try to account for them, can not be explained by heredity. They are 

 the first and the last in the families that produced them, without any 

 visible transmission of superior gifts. Going back in history, but still 

 keeping to modern times, are not Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare also 

 solitary great ones, who can not be satisfactorily accounted for, either 

 by organic evolution, the intellectual medium, or generation ? All those 

 external conditions of genius that have been so often analyzed and de- 

 scribed may have prepared for the event and primed for the occasion. 

 The last turn was still wanting, the supreme gift that should be de- 

 cisive over all the rest, and bring it about that among so many heads 

 in the same family or the same nation, equally predestined by the 

 same concurrence of circumstances, one only should have been chosen, 

 and that the light should have shone upon that elect head only ; and 

 we may keep on asking, Why on that head, and not on another ? No, 

 to this day the great gift of inspiration in science, poetry, and art has 

 not revealed its secret. Those sovereign minds, precisely by what 

 they possess that is incommunicable, rise high and alone above the 

 flood of generations which precede and follow them, and by reason of 

 this superior side of their nature they do not belong to nature. Those 

 exalted originals in mind who tower above mankind have no fathers 

 and leave no sons in the blood. Notwithstanding Mr. Galton, the 

 least hereditary thing in the world is genius. 



M. de Candolle * appears to us to have exactly analyzed the origin 

 and conditions of the kind of mental heredity in a slighter degree that 

 we might represent by the words talent, vocation, and aptitude. While 

 he does not deny the influence of heredity in the development of vo- 

 cations, especially of scientific vocations, which are the special object 

 of his study, he does not declare it exclusive and decisive. After ma- 



* " Histoirc des Sciences et des Savants depuis Deux Siecles." 



