PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. f)7 



Mr. Herbert Spencer has followed out this same line of rea 

 soning as applied to the great development of the musical faculty 

 in Germany, and shown that the Haydns, Mozarts, Beetho- 

 vens, the Liszts, Rubensteins, and Wagners, have formed, as 

 it were, the several peaks of a great hereditary musical uplift 

 in the German nation. The same is true of Italy, not only in 

 music, but especially in sculpture, and we have there, so to 

 speak, a race of sculptors. Those who, without any patriotic 

 bias, compared the Italian and American pieces at the Cen 

 tennial Exhibition could not help being impressed with this. 

 There could be seen the most exquisite pieces of statuary, in 

 which not only features of rare perfection and beauty, but 

 every form of drapery were represented in marble with a true- 

 ness to life that almost deceived the looker on. And to such 

 pieces were attached, not one or two celebrated names, but a 

 great number of names of artists unknown to the public out 

 side of those who make sculpture a special study. Contrast 

 ing these perfect productions with the lifeless ones that repre 

 sented the highest reaches of American sculpture, even those 

 produced by Americans who had spent many years at Rome 

 and worked in an atmosphere of Italian sculpture, I was im 

 pressed with the little that a single generation can accomplish 

 in such things, and with the fact that in Italy we have a race 

 of born sculptors who inherit their deftness from ancestors as 

 remote as Michel Angelo. . 



Weismann has not ignored the arguments from this side, but 

 his attempts to meet them are among the weakest of all his 

 reasonings. Here are some samples of them : ' ' The children, ' ' 

 he says, ' ' of accomplished pianists do not inherit the art of 

 playing the piano ; they have to learn it in the same laborious 

 manner as that by which their parents acquired it ; they do 

 not inherit anything except that which their parents also pos- 



