145 



from one source ? and if we could each trace our pedigrees 

 back into the ages when man first made his appearance 

 upon earth, we should find them all converging in him the 

 primal and earliest father of our race whose brow first 

 shone with the divineness of humanity. If heredity is a 

 law of our being, it has been so since man first appeared 

 on earth ; let us see how this affects the question. Let us 

 take the case of any living individual : he must have had a 

 father and mother ; these also must have had fathers and 

 mothers ; and these also ; and so on back through the 

 ages to the earliest parents of the human family. We may 

 regard health and disease as coeval with human life ; 

 therefore the pedigree of disease is not to be regarded as 

 of recent origin, or its sources traceable to recent influences, 

 but rather to be found in the records of the earliest history 

 of man, wherein we may read the "record of its long 

 descent." Throughout the ages, and amid the many altered 

 conditions of the earth, man has been much the same as 

 he now is, as far as his subjection to the laws of heredity and 

 variability ; the same in barbarism as in civilisation ; the 

 same with regard to his health and his diseases ; it therefore 

 follows that whilst the influences of heredity are strongest 

 upon him, the more closely he is subjected to the influences 

 of his more immediate ancestors, all the past may be said to 

 slumber in him. We should not therefore regard hereditary 

 descent as affecting only the transmission of the parents' 

 peculiarities to their children, but also the transmission of 

 qualities derivable from earlier, and even remote, ancestors. 

 How necessary this is we can infer from the frequency with 

 which latent or dormant peculiarities traceable to some 

 remote or collateral member of a family develop themselves 

 unexpectedly in some of his descendants ; and thus it is that 



