224 ROUGH WAYS MADE SMOOTH. 



account of his family affairs. Having lost his right arm by 

 an accident, the correspondence was temporarily kept up by 

 one or other of his children ; but in the course of a few 

 months he learned to write with his left hand, and before 

 long, the handwriting of the letters thus written came to be 

 indistinguishable from that of his former letters.' 



I had occasion two or three years ago to consider in 

 an article on ' Strange Mental Feats,' in my Science Byeways, 

 the question of inherited mental qualities and artistic habits, 

 and would refer the reader for some remarkable instances of 

 transmitted powers to that article. 1 Galton in his work on 

 Hereditary Genius, and Ribot in his treatise on Heredity, 

 have collected many facts bearing on this interesting ques- 

 tion. Both writers show a decided bias in favour of a view 

 which would give to heredity a rather too important position 

 among the factors of genius. Cases are cited which seem 

 very little to the purpose, and multitudes of instances are 

 omitted which oppose themselves, at a first view at any rate, 

 to the belief that heredity plays the first part in the genesis 

 of great minds. Nearly all the greatest names in philosophy, 

 literature, and science, and a great number of the greatest 

 names in art, stand absolutely alone. We know nothing 

 achieved by the father or grandfather of Shakspeare, or of 

 Goethe, or Schiller, or Evans (George Eliot), or Thackeray, 

 or Dickens, or Huxley. None of Newton's family were in 

 any way distinguished in mathematical or scientific work ; 

 nor do we know of a distinguished Laplace, or Lagrange, or 

 Lavoisier, or Harvey, or Dalton, or Volta, or Faraday, besides 

 those who made these names illustrious. As to general 

 literature, page after page might be filled with the mere 

 names of those whose ancestry has been quite undistin- 

 guished. To say that among the ancestors of Goethe, 

 Schiller, Byron, and so forth, certain qualities, virtues or 

 vices, passions or insensibilities to passion, may be recog- 

 nised * among the ancestors of men of science, certain apti- 

 tudes for special subjects or methods of research,' among 



1 See my Science Byeways, p. 337 et seq. 



