PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. H7 



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

 soning as applied to the great development of the musical facult}' 

 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 Itah-, 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 draper}- 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 tho.se 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 b}' 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 wdio inherit their deftness from anqestors 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 ; the}' do 

 not inherit anything except that which their parents also pos- 



