90 HEREDITY 



be a variation or not. And so the boy has to fight 

 for the education, or environment, which the musical 

 potentiaHty in him demands for its education. A 

 father can never tell what variation may bring forth, 

 and it is therefore his duty, since he remembers 

 that an unfavourable environment {e.g. the wrong 

 sort of education) may suppress or atrophy a precious 

 variation, closely to study his child, so as to discover 

 what its germinal — innate, inherited — characters are. 

 Thereupon he will so construct the environment of 

 his child (i.e. will so educate it) as to suppress the 

 bad potentialities and educe the good. Nor will he, 

 if he be a student of heredity, too readily assume 

 that potentialities unexpressed in himself may not 

 be present in his child. Such potentialities may have 

 been innate in the father but suppressed by his en- 

 vironment ; or their occurrence in the child may be 

 a true variation, i.e. a character innate in the child 

 but unpossessed by the parent. 



This is one of the cases where we require to take 

 Dr. Johnson's advice and " clear our minds of cant." 

 The cardinal primacy of heredity as compared with 

 environment, a primacy on which I have surely insisted 

 in the preceding pages, and the marvellous fashion 

 in which genius can triumph over the environment — 

 remould it to its heart's desire — and notably our very 

 natural preference for the belief that " genius will 

 out," have led many to maintain that Gray was 

 wrong when he wrote the familiar lines : — 



" PerhaiDS in this neglected spot is laid 



Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire, 

 Hands, that the rod of emj^ire might have sway'd, 

 Or wak'd to extasy the living lyre. 



