2 HEREDITY AND INHERITANCE 



ment in the widest sense, — food, climate, housing, scenery, and 

 the animate milieu ; and to Function in the widest sense, — 

 exercise, education, occupation, or the lack of these ; but all 

 these potent influences act upon an organism whose fundamental 

 nature is determined, though not rigidly fixed, by its Heredity — 

 that is, we repeat, by its genetic relation to its forebears. As 

 Herbert Spencer said, " Inherited constitution must ever be the 

 chief factor in determining character " ; as Disraeli said, more 

 epigrammatically and less correctly, " Race is everything." 



Heredity is a Condition of all Organic Evolution. — In the 

 same way, when we consider the race rather than the individual, 

 we must admit that in so far as evolution depends on inborn 

 organic changes, on what is bred in the bone and imbued in the 

 blood, as distinguished from individual efforts and acquirements, 

 external institutions and traditional culture, it is conditioned 

 by the hereditary relation which binds one generation to another. 

 Heredity is a condition of all organic evolution. Innate changes 

 or variations, which form the raw material of constitutional 

 progress or degeneracy, have direct racial importance because 

 they are certainly transmissible ; while, on the other hand, 

 bodily modifications or acquired characters, due to changes in 

 environment or in function, probably have no direct racial 

 importance, since there is little or no evidence that they are 

 ever hereditarily entailed. They are individually important, 

 and in human society they are of much moment, but if they 

 are not transmissible they do not take organic grip, and they 

 cannot afford material for selection to work with. For the 

 human race, the external heritage of tradition, institutions, and 

 law, the permanent products of literature and art, the registrated 

 results of science, and so on, are of paramount importance, but 

 they are outside the immediate problem of organic or natural 

 inheritance. As far as the slow, sure process of constitutional 

 or organic evolution is concerned, everything depends on the 

 heritable resemblances and the heritable variations which form 



