The 

 Human 

 Harvest 



Heredity 



repeats 



nvhat she 



finds 



[50] 



of such an atmosphere may be an effect of 

 race decadence, but it is not a cause of the 

 lowered tone of the nation. 



Evil influences may kill the individual, but 

 they cannot tarnish the stream of heredity. 

 The child of each generation is free-born so 

 far as heredity goes, and the sins of the 

 fathers are not visited upon him. If vice 

 strikes deeply enough to wreck the man, it 

 is likely to wreck or kill the child as well, 

 not through heredity, but through lack of 

 nutrition. The child depends on its parents 

 for its early vitality, its constitutional 

 strength, the momentum of its life, if we 

 may use the term. For this a sound parent- 

 age demands a sound body. The unsound 

 parentage yields the withered branches, the 

 lineage which speedily comes to the end. 

 But this class of influences, affecting not the 

 germ-plasm, but general vitality, has no re- 

 lation to hereditary qualities, so far as we 

 know. 



In heredity there can be no natural or nec- 

 essary tendency downward or upward. Na- 

 ture repeats, and that is all. It is not what 

 parents actually are, — but what they might 



