94 ANDREW JACKSON HOWE. 



score years and ten? Was it lost? No, not lost. 

 Nothing in the universe is absolutely lost. 



If the brain be stunned by a blow, the nerve-cells 

 are so disturbed that no mind is evolved the injured 

 person is unconscious, and he is dreamless. His 

 mind-elaborating battery has suspended operations. 

 At length the disturbance of function is removed ; 

 then mind-making is resumed. The chemico-vital 

 machine gets into full operation again. The suspen- 

 sion was temporary, yet it might have been per- 

 manent, as in death. . . . . , 



The infant mind, so far as it manifests itself, may, 

 while developing, exhibit certain peculiarities derived 

 from both parents, and certain others traceable to 

 more or less remote ancestors. The mixed mental in- 

 heritance is not more mysterious than the physical 

 combination which exhibits ancestral peculiarities of 

 a multiple character ; yet the complex influence that 

 stamps personality upon every recurring individual is 

 a product of general heredity and not the result of 

 mental growth in the person. In other words, through 

 the complexities of descent, a psychical power runs 

 which is not wholly mental in origin, though influ- 

 enced from generation to generation by intellectual 

 activities. A child is not mentally just like its father 

 nor its mother, nor like any of its ancestors, but it 

 possesses a new combination of psychical powers 

 which simply resemble those that have gone before. 

 Each child comes into existence with a novel admix- 

 ture of psychical peculiarities it comes with a soul 

 inheriting the features of all its ancestors commingled. 

 In the new being are renewed all the characteristics 

 of antecedent races of mankind ; and new combina- 

 tions will live forever, or as long as the human race 



