CHATTEE V 



THE LAW OF HEREDITY 



It is a matter of common observation that children 

 resemble their parents. They do so in varying de- 

 grees. Some members of a family are like their 

 mother, others their father ; very often the character- 

 istics of both parents are combined in the offspring. 

 Physically, these resemblances have always been un- 

 deniable, but, strange to say, it has been reserved for 

 modern science to establish beyond a doubt the ex- 

 istence of heredity in the moral faculties. All the 

 great schools of philosophy have treated the moral 

 element in man's nature, that is to say, his disposition, 

 his proneness to evil or to good, either as a fixed 

 principle implanted in him without reference to his 

 parentage, or as a thing to be moulded in the indi- 

 vidual by his will and his surroundings. Both these 

 hypotheses, we now know, were partly right and 



