HEREDITY IN PHYSIOLOGY, IN MEDICINE, ETC. 345 



tive races, it is true, and they still are the law of savage 

 tribes ; but nothing, to begin with, proves that heredity is 

 the cause of this. Such a reappearance, during a longer 

 or shorter tract of time, of societies exactly alike, seems to 

 be much more properly attributable to the potent and irre- 

 sistible instinct of imitation, and to positive respect for 

 rites and customs commanded by religion. With these 

 tribes, the future is like the present, and the present re- 

 peats the past only because the same unbending rule, the 

 same authority and the same tyrannical superstition, press 

 on all alike. Nothing has any strength or respect among 

 such people, except through tradition, and tradition among 

 them is merely the honored memory of a will once of old 

 expressed by mysterious powers. When the English de- 

 sire to interest the Hindoos in the works of communication 

 and of hygiene that they are effecting in India, they are 

 even at this day forced to convince them first that the useful- 

 ness of such works was well understood by the Brahmans 

 in the remotest times, so difficult is it for that ancient race 

 to believe that a rule can be obligatory unless it is tradi- 

 tional. 



At all events, and whatever part heredity may be al- 

 lowed in this matter, it is certain that its part is not great, 

 because that strange homogeneity of primitive races, in- 

 stead of maintaining and strengthening itself, yields sooner 

 or later to diversity. Every people in turn is invaded by 

 a force as powerful for action counter to that of hereditary 

 influences as it is in striking off the iron yoke of primal 

 customs. It was in Greece, nearly three thousand years ago, 

 that the first throe of that force shaped and worked what 

 Goethe calls "the liberation of humanity." Since then, 

 the crossings of distinct races, new needs and the diversi- 

 fied inventions which they have suggested without end, the 

 ideas awakened in man by the ever-growing closeness of 

 his contact with Nature, have brought into the place of 



