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OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 109 



a marked resemblance to each other, while their features, taken sepa- 

 rately, are wholly unlike. This similarity of expression, however, is not 

 congenital, but is gradually superinduced upon Nature's work, through 

 living together a long while in sympathy and confidence under similar 

 influences and education, whereby, as is often remarked, husband and 

 wife, after a long life of matrimony, come to resemble each other. And 

 if this is the case even with adults, who come together only after age 

 has given rigidity to the face and stereotyped its expression, how much 

 more readily will the plastic features of infancy and children yield to 

 similar influences and adopt the family pattern. Hence it is, that this 

 likeness of expression generally cannot be seen in early infancy, and 

 appears very faintly at first, but deepens and strengthens as the child 

 advances in years. Through the same cause, also, the handwriting of 

 the different members of the same family is often strikingly similar, 

 though they may have learned how to write from different teacjiers ; 

 and probably no one will maintain handwriting to be hereditary. 



All that has been said of the external features is applicable, also, vau- 

 tatis mutandis, to traits of mind and character. The hereditary trans- 

 mission of the latter is even less probable than of the former, on account 

 of the acknowledged almost immeasurable diversity of mental traits, and 

 because the few points of similarity can be more probably referred to 

 the influence of education, imitation, involuntary sympathy, and other 

 like bonds which draw together and assimilate parent and child, however 

 originally unlike. But in spite of these causes all tending to create 

 ultimate resemblance, we still find genius and stupidity, temper, affec- 

 tion, and taste so very unequally and capriciously distributed among 

 members of the same family, that the diversities can be attributed only 

 to nature's own ordinance established for this very purpose. Analyze 

 any case presented as evidence of the opposite theory, and we see more 

 plainly than ever the error of laying stress upon the affirmative points, 

 while the negative instances are overlooked or forgotten. 



Mr. George Combe cites an author who attributes the fatality which 

 attended the House of Stuart " to a certain obstinacy of temper, which 

 appears to have been hereditary and inherent in all the Stuarts except 

 Charles H." But this perverse wilfulness seems more probably attrib- 

 utable to the education received, every Stuart being trained by a Stuart, 

 and by an Anglican clergy then fanatically attached to the dogmas of 

 the divine right of kings, and the subject's duty of passive obedience. 

 Charles H. bad his training in the hard school of adversity and exile, 



