194 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS. 



with automatic actions which have arisen accidentally, or 

 without intelligent purpose ; and it would be anomalous were 

 the fact otherwise with automatic actions which have been 

 acquired consciously. The evidence that the fact is not 

 otherwise is considerable. 



First we may take the case of man. " On what a curious 

 combination of corporeal structure, mental character, and 

 training," says Mr. Darwin, "must hand-writing depend! 

 Yet every one must have noted the occasional close similarity 

 of the hand-writing in father and son, although the father 

 had not taught the son .... Hof acker, in Germany, 

 remarks on the inheritance of hand -writing; and it has been 

 even asserted that English boys, when taught to write in 

 France, naturally cling to their English manner of writing." 

 Dr. Carpenter says he is " assured by Miss Cobbe that in her 

 family a very characteristic type of hand-writing is traceable 

 through five generations;" and in his own family there 

 occurred a curious case of a gentleman who inherited a 

 " constitutional " character of hand-writing, and lost his right 

 arm by an accident; "in the course of a few months he 

 learnt to write with his left hand, and before long the hand- 

 writing of the letters thus written came to be indistinguish- 

 able from that of his former letters." This case reminds me 

 of a fact which I have frequently observed — and which has 

 doubtless been observed by others — viz., that if I write in any 

 unusual direction (as, for instance, on the perpendicular face 

 of a recording cylinder), the hand-writing is unaltered in 

 character, although both the hand and the eye are working in 

 a most unusual manner ; so strong is the mental element in 

 hand-writing. Similarly, as observed in a previous chapter, 

 if one takes a pencil in each hand and writes the same word 

 with both hands simultaneously — the left hand writing from 

 right to left — on holding the backward written word before 

 a mirror, the hand- writing may at once be recognized. 



Many other instances might be given of the force of 

 inheritance in the mental acquisitions of man.* But turning 



* See Carpenter, Mental Physiology, pp. 393-4, where he discusses and 

 gives cases of hereditary aptitude for music and painting. Also Gralton's 

 Hereditary Genius, for high mental qualities running in families, either in 

 the same or in analogous lines of activity ; and Spencer {Psychology, i, p. 422) 

 for race-characteristics of psychology in man. The effects of " good breeding " 

 or " blood " in bequeathing hereditary disposition and refinement have already 



