68 GENETICS 



"Some are born great, 

 Some achieve greatness, 

 Some have greatness thrust upon them." 



"Born" characters are constitutional, having their 

 origin in the germplasm itself. They are never 

 Weismannian acquired characters and may be illus- 

 trated by eye-color, mental disposition, or facial fea- 

 tures. Lightning calculators and musical prodigies 

 may have their gifts developed and enlarged, but the 

 fact that their talent is nevertheless an unmistakable 

 gift, and not an acquisition, remains true. 



"Achieved" characters are functional and are 

 gained by exercise. Many things are achieved, how- 

 ever, which are not acquired characters, as, for in- 

 stance, wealth, reputation, or an education. Not any 

 of these are biological characters, and therefore we 

 are not concerned with them in this connection, al- 

 though in the case of education it should be noticed 

 that the mental exercise necessary to bring about a 

 trained mind, if not the subject matter of the educa- 

 tion itself, is distinctly an acquired character of the 

 "achieved" type. 



"Thrust" characters are the results of environment. 

 They are acquired without functional activity on the 

 part of the organism and usually in spite of anything 

 the organism can do to prevent. Sometimes these 

 characters are thrust upon the individuals before birth, 

 as in the case of blindness caused by parental gonor- 

 rhoea or tuberculosis arising from uterine infection, 

 in which case they are termed congenital characters. 



Congenital or prenatal characters, however, are in 



