286 Human Physiology. 



desire and ability to " make money." These traits have grown 

 out of their conditions for many centuries. The peculiarities 

 of the Saxon, Celtic, Scandinavian, and Sclavonic races are 

 handed down from parents to children. Climates, conditions, 

 and crossing of races modify these characteristics of race as we 

 see to-day in America, or even in Australia; but the law of 

 hereditary transmission remains one of the most potent of all 

 the influences that mould and govern our humanity. 



It is one of the most astounding marvels of physiology, that 

 the whole character, exterior and interior, of an animal or a 

 man should lie in its germ lie within the compass of i-24ooth 

 of an inch diameter lie in a microscopic cell. It is incompre- 

 hensible that all the life of man his bodily organisation, his 

 intellect, genius, sentiments his whole character, and all his 

 peculiarities of temper and temperament, habits and propensi- 

 ties, humours arid diseases, should lie in so narrow a compass 

 .as the sperm cell, or germ cell, of either parent. The fact, 

 however, cannot be doubted. The child of a white father and 

 black mother is a mulatto, partaking of the character of each. 

 The child of a well-marked Frenchman and Englishwoman 

 shows the same admixture of peculiarities. We can often pick 

 out of a group of children of the lower classes the chance off- 

 spring, or "love-child" of a father of gentle birth and breeding. 

 Special aptitudes, as for music, painting, poetry, or the mecha- 

 nic arts, are inherited as surely as the qualities of dogs and 

 horses. Whole races are musical or poetical as a rule, or the 

 reverse. Intellectual educability is found to depend on blood, 

 or on the education of progenitors. Hence the work of edu- 

 cating a long-neglected people must always be a slow one, 

 and extend over several generations. Mr. Herbert Spencer says, 

 "The capacity of a germ of unfolding into a complex adult, which 

 repeats ancestral traits in the minutest details, is one we cannot 

 understand. That a microscopic globule should become a man 

 gouty at fifty is a truth, incredible, if not daily illustrated." 



