THE JUKES. 55 



and prove that pauperism can be controlled by controlling the 

 passion which, disease aside, tends more than all other causes put 

 together to perpetuate it hereditarily. 



The Formation of Character. Where there is heredity of any 

 characteristic, it would seem there is a tendency, and it might al- 

 most be said, a certainty to produce an environment for the next 

 generation corresponding to that heredity, with the effect of per- 

 petuating it. Where the environment changes in youth the charac- 

 teristics of heredity may be measurably altered. Hence the 

 importance of education. In treating the subject it must be 

 clearly understood and practically accepted, that the whole ques- 

 tion of the educational management of crime, vice, and pauperism 

 rests strictly- and fundamentally upon a physiological basis, and not 

 upon a sentimental or a metaphysical one. These phenomena take 

 place not because there is any aberration in the laws of nature, but in 

 consequence of the operation of these laws; because disease, because 

 unsanitary conditions, because educational neglects, produce arrest 

 of cerebral development at some point, so that the individual fails to 

 meet the exigencies of the civilization of his time and country, and 

 that the cure for unbalanced lives is a training which will affect 

 the cerebral tissue, producing a corresponding change of career. 

 This process of atrophy, physical and social, is to be met by 

 methods that will remove the disabilities which check the required 

 cerebral growth, or where the modification to be induced is pro- 

 found, by the cumulative effect of training through successive gen- 

 erations under conditions favorable to such strengthening. 



We have seen that disease in the parent will produce idiocy in 

 the child ; this is arrest of cerebral development : that it will cause 

 early death ; this is arrest of development. Besides these, arrest of 

 development takes place in various other forms, at different stages 

 and under widely differing circumstances. Excess of the passions pre- 

 vents mental organization ; and neglected childhood even, produces 

 the equivalent of arrest of development ; for, as in the case of the 

 idiot, the arrest of cerebral development is caused by want of alimen- 

 tary nutrition to the brain, so in the untaught child we get arrest of 

 cerebral development caused by neglecting to furnish properly or- 



