X.] IN ANIMALS AND MAN. 47 



Hummel, Cramer, Abt Vogler, Hasse, Johannes Brahms, 

 Robert Volkmann, Czerny, Karl Reinecke, Cherubini, Bellini, 

 Rossini, Antonio Lotti, and Scarlatti. In all these cases it is 

 clear that a highly-developed musical sense was transmitted 

 from father to son, while the talent of the latter was further 

 developed than that of the father, because it was trained and 

 exercised from earliest youth, although I do not mean to imply 

 that it was not also greater from the very beginning. But the 

 greater force of the inherited talent does not depend upon the 

 weaker talent of the father having been improved by practice 

 during his life-time. Many still believe in the hereditary 

 transmission of improvement acquired by practice ; but if such 

 inheritance could take place so rapidly, in a single generation, 

 we should easily find proofs of it in many occupations and 

 pursuits — proofs which are as yet entirely wanting. 



I shall, however, be asked : Whence came the increase in 

 the talent of Mozart and Beethoven as contrasted with that of 

 their fathers ? It is impossible to give any definite answer to 

 this question, but I can, perhaps, indicate it by another ques- 

 tion : Whence came the high poetic genius of Goethe, whose 

 father had no taste for poetry, while his mother without ever 

 having written, exhibited, in her whole character, the most 

 distinct endowments in this direction ? How could the poetic 

 genius of the mother, which had never been exercised, attain 

 so high a level in the son ? We must not forget that poetic 

 talent is by no means a simple power but a very complex one, 

 depending on a happy combination of many intellectual and 

 emotional gifts, which in Goethe's case were derived, as he 

 himself tells us, partly from the father and partly from the 

 mother. 



*Vom Vater hab' ich die Statur, 



Des Lebens ernstes Fiihren ; 

 Vom Miittercheii die Frohnatur, 



Die Lust zum Fabuliren,' &c. 



Similarly, I should be inclined to explain the genius of 

 Mozart as a very complex power made up of the fine ear, the 

 strength of will and energy of his father, and the bright and 

 cheerful disposition, the gentleness and refinement of feeling 

 of his mother. From this constitution may have arisen the 

 infinite flexibility of that wonderful mind which, with unwearied 



