ON HARNESSING HEREDITY 



If new habits are hard to start, new traits are 

 harder. It is hard to teach a plant to twine when 

 it has never twined before, or to persuade it to 

 be pink when it has always been yellow; just as 

 it is hard to get a boy interested in the study of 

 law when his likes, all his life, have been along 

 the lines of engineering or mechanics. 



In the establishment of a new trait, in fact, 

 the whole motion of life must be interrupted, its 

 momentum arrested, the resulting inertia over- 

 come, and new momentum in a new direction 

 gained. 



But, if every difficulty has its recompense, we 

 are well repaid for the labor of acquiring or 

 instilling a new trait by the fact that, once 

 acquired, it has a tendency of its own to increase 

 and expand and grow. 



The boy who finally gets interested in law, who 

 gets past the point where it becomes an irksome 

 drudgery, begins, at length, to develop a steadfast 

 love for his work so that what was to him, once, a 

 bug-bear at last becomes an absorbing ideal. 



The cactus, for example, which produced its 

 first spines with difficulty, now gets more and 

 more spiny, although the need for spines has 

 disappeared. Our flowers grow more beautiful, 

 our fruits more luscious as their tendencies gain 

 momentum. 



[145] 



