THE INBORN POTENTIALITY OF THE CHILD 317 



taste is experienced ; if the eye or optic nerve, a bright light ; 

 and the auditory nerve excited gives rise to the sensation of 

 sound ; and the skin, a sensation of painful vibration. Each 

 neural system then has a specific energy of its own to transform 

 this electrical energy into specific neural energy and to store up 

 memories of the same in the brain. 



The Temperament — A Complex of Characters derived from 

 Species, Sex, Race, and Progenitors. — It is obvious that the fixed 

 characters of species and sex form an important basis of the 

 inborn potentialities of the mind of the child ; they are dependent 

 upon preorganised nervous mechanisms ; in addition to these 

 which are similar in all human beings, we have other potentialities 

 due to race. I need not tell you that just as there are inborn 

 structural characters of the body, including the brain peculiar to 

 different races, so there are temperamental characteristics, and 

 these inborn racial temperamental qualities play an important 

 part in the formation of the raw material of character, which is a 

 complex derived from species, sex, race, and progenitors. We 

 are all familiar with the quick perceptive emotional temperament 

 of the Celts, and both history and biography teach us the success 

 that has attended the blending of the Irish, Celtic, and Anglo- 

 Saxon temperaments in the production of great generals and 

 statesmen. 



As Pathologist to the London County Asylums I have been 

 for a long time engaged in studying the effects of family inheri- 

 tance in relation to disorders and diseases of the organ of mind, 

 and with this part of the subject I will next deal. 



Ancestral Inheritance in relation to the Inborn Potentialities of 

 the Child's Brain. — I pointed out to you in my last lecture that 

 the convolutional pattern of the brain — the organ of mind — is no 

 haphazard affair, but is dependent upon the inheritance of similar 

 folds and fissures from progenitors ; just as we know that in 

 every face are the features of ancestors, so in every character may 

 be the character of ancestors. Galton's statistical inquiry into 

 the inheritance of good and bad tempers showed that one set of 

 influences tends to mix good and bad tempers in a family at 

 haphazard ; another tends to assimilate them, or that they should 

 all be good or all be bad ; a third set tends to divide families into 

 contracted portions. This pedigree (fig. 5) shows in the third 

 generation a sorting out or segregation of good and bad tempers 

 according as the children resembled the father and mother 



