504 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL 



designed and executed St. Paul's Cathedral, which will 

 certainly rank among the finest modern buildings in the 

 world ; Ray, the son of a blacksmith, became a good mathe- 

 matician, and one of the greatest of our early naturalists ; 

 John Hunter, the great anatomist, was the son of a small 

 Scotch landholder ; Sir William Herschel was a professional 

 musician, the son of a German bandmaster ; Rembrandt 

 was the son of a miller ; the great linguists and oriental 

 scholars, Alexander Murray and Dr. Leyden, were both sons 

 of poor Scotch shepherds ; while Shelley, whose poetic 

 genius has rarely been surpassed, was the son of an 

 altogether unpoetic and unsympathetic country squire. 



These few examples, which might be easily increased so 

 as to fill a volume, serve to show, what is indeed seldom 

 denied, that genius or superexcellence in any department 

 of human faculty tends to be sporadic, that is, it appears 

 suddenly without any proportionate development in the 

 parents or immediate ancestors of the gifted individual. No 

 doubt there is usually, or perhaps always, a considerable 

 amount of the same mental qualities dispersed through 

 the diverging ancestral line of all these men of genius, and 

 their appearance seems to be well explained by a fortu- 

 nate intermingling of the germ-plasms of several ancestors 

 calculated to produce or to intensify the various mental 

 peculiarities on which the exceptional faculties depend. 

 This is rendered probable, also, by the fact that, although 

 genius is often inherited it rarely or never intensifies after 

 its first appearance, which it certainly should do if not 

 only the genius itself, but the increased mental power due 

 to its exercise were also inherited. Brunei, Stephenson, 

 Dollond, and Herschel, all had sons who followed in the 

 steps of their fathers ; but it will be generally admitted 

 that in no case did the sons exceed or even equal their 

 parents in originality and mental power. So, if we look 

 through the copious roll of names of great poets, and 

 painters, sculptors, architects, engineers, or scientific dis- 

 coverers, we shall hardly ever find even two of the same 

 name and profession, and never three or four, rising pro- 

 gressively to loftier heights of genius and fame. Yet this 

 is what we ought to find if not only the innate faculty, 



