Heredity and National CJiaracter. 107 



TROMP, Marten, and his son> Cornelius van Tromp, famous Dutch 



admirals. 

 TCJRENNE, probably the greatest general produced by France, 



prior to Napoleon ; 

 His father, Henri, Due de Bouillon, pupil of the 6cole de Henri 



IV., was leader of the Huguenots ; 



Turenne's relationship to the house of Orange has been already 

 mentioned. 



It would be easy, by searching history, to collect a far larger 

 number of cases of heredity. Those here given are sufficient to 

 disprove all idea of accidental coincidence. It is not surprising 

 that cases of heredity seem to be rarer among great soldiers than 

 elsewhere. Many soldiers gifted with great natural abilities must 

 have died before they could attain to fame or found a family. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



HEREDITY AND. NATIONAL CHARACTER. 



WE have thus hastily traversed the field of history, noting a few 

 important cases of mental heredity in families of artists, men of 

 science, literary men, soldiers, and statesmen. Considerations of 

 this nature are so foreign to most historians that their works afford 

 but little aid in our present study. They care little for details, 

 which are ' beneath the dignity of history,' and disregard those 

 little, precise, and trivial facts which teach us more about a char- 

 acter than ten pages of vague phrases. From biographies and 

 memoirs we may learn more, though in them little attention is 

 bestowed on physiological data. The day will, perhaps, yet come 

 when such history will not be so disregarded and so rare, and when 

 it will be seen that the infinitesimally small plays, in the evolution 

 of humanity, the same latent and incessant part as in the evolution 

 of nature. Then history, without neglecting the study of great 

 facts and their connection which is its chief purpose will furnish 

 the psychologist with materials both numerous and precise. Since, 



