THE LAW OF HEREDITY 61 



Gauls, described by Caesar, appear to have had much 

 in common with the French people of the present 

 day ; tliey were fond of revolutions, impulsive, easily 

 led by false reports, ready to declare war without 

 reason, and quickly discouraged in defeat. Ethnolo- 

 gists rely upon heredity in tracing out even the con- 

 stituent elements of a nation. Without hesitation 

 they can pronounce the population of one English 

 county to be largely Danish, for example, or that of 

 another Celtic, and so on, and the characteristics of 

 the different races must have been maintained in 

 such cases for over a thousand years,^ 



Leaving nations and coming to individuals, we 

 discover curious irregularities in hereditary trans- 

 mission. Physical or moral characteristics — using 

 the word moral in its widest sense — sometimes skip 

 a generation, passing from a man to his grandson ; 

 daughters may be like their fathers and sons like 

 their mothers, or vice versd ; and moral resemblance 

 may accompany physical resemblance or it may not. 

 Heredity thus appears to act capriciously in in- 

 dividual cases ; but like the law of averages, its 

 results, when observed over a sufficiently wide area, 

 are pretty uniform. Darwin surmises that the germ of 



^ Beddoe, The Races of Britain. 

 G 



