162 Heredity. (April, 
be the moral faculties* of patience, perseverance, and con- 
centration. ‘The will must be strong enough to overcome 
all distracting temptations, whether in themselves good or 
evil. Lastly, there must be constitutional energy and en- 
durance. Failing these, the man will merely leave among 
his friends the conviction that he might have achieved 
greatness, if ——. We once knew a physician, resident in 
a small country town, who, from time to time, startled his 
associates by some profound and suggestive idea—some 
brilliant appercu. But a constitutional languor prevented 
him from ever completing an investigation, or from leaving 
the world one written line. 
Nor need we feel greatly surprised if the son of an illus- 
trious man proves, intellectually or morally, a failure. The 
world often expects from such a one too much. He is lost 
to sight amidst his father’s fame, like Mercury in the blaze 
of the Sun. Further, we must remember that men of the 
very highest order often fail to leave any posterity at all,— 
a circumstance too common to be merely casual, and point- 
ing, we think, to the truth, that in producing a genius 
a family exhausts itself. Is it, then, very wonderful if men 
—eminent, though not of the foremost rank—should leave 
progeny inferior to themselves ? 
The suggestion of Mr. Cox—that every organism is pro- 
duced by the union of two germs, one supplied by the male 
and the other by the female parent—seems to us certainly 
to throw a clearer light upon some of the phenomena con- 
nected with hybridism. ‘‘ All living forms,” he writes, “‘ are 
double ; that is to say, they are not one whole constructed 
as a whole, but two halves joined together, always more or 
less unlike,t having points of resemblance and of difference 
obviously derived some from one parent and some from the 
other, and which indicate a greater share by both parents in 
the product than has yet been assigned them. The sug- 
gestion of a double germ (one supplied by each parent) 
accounts naturally for hereditary characteristics and tenden- 
cies, mental and bodily, and for the mysteries of hybridism. 
If it be true that Nature’s method is by the union of 
two germs, practical horticulture, no less than physiology 
and psychology, will have secured a firm foundation, from 
* Are we right in drawing such a rigid line of demarcation between the in- 
tellectual and the moral powers? Do they not rather exist in what might be 
called ‘¢ mixed solution ?” 
+ Entomologists occasionally meet with moths one-half of whose body, 
taken laterally, is male, whilst the other half is female. We have ourselves 
captured a specimen of this kind. 
