Heredity 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



304 



that the children of drunkards are deficient 

 in bodily and vital energy, and are predis- 

 posed by their very organization to have 

 cravings for alcoholic stimulants. If they 

 pursue the course of their fathers, which 

 they have more temptation to follow, and 

 less power to avoid, than the children of 

 the temperate, they add to their hereditary 

 weakness, and increase the tendency to 

 idiocy or insanity in their constitution, and 

 this they leave to their children after them. 

 [See ALCOHOL.] CARPENTER Mental Physi- 

 ology, ch. 8, p. 370. (A., 1900.) 



1480. HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

 Master-influences of Life. These two, 

 heredity and environment, are the master- 

 influences of the organic world. These have 

 made all of us what we are. These forces 

 are still ceaselessly playing upon all our 

 lives. And he who truly understands these 

 influences; he who has decided how much 

 to allow to each; he who can regulate new 

 forces as they arise, or adjust them to the 

 old, so directing them as at one moment to 

 make them cooperate, at another to counter- 

 act one another, understands the rationale 

 of personal development. To seize continu- 

 ously the opportunity of more and more per- 

 fect adjustment to better and higher condi- 

 tions, to balance some inward evil with some 

 purer influence acting from without, in a 

 word to make our environment at the same 

 time that it is making us these are the 

 secrets of a well-ordered and successful life. 

 DRUMMOND Natural Law in the Spiritual 

 World, essay 7, p. 229. (H. Al.) 



1481. HEREDITY EVERYTHING IN 

 LOWEST TYPE OF ANIMAL Starts with 

 Nothing To Learn. The psychical life of 

 the lowest animals consists of a few simple 

 acts directed toward the securing of food 

 and the avoidance of danger, and these acts 

 we are in the habit of classing as instinc- 

 tive. They are so simple, so few, and so 

 often repeated that the tendency to per- 

 form them is completely organized in the 

 nervous system before birth* The animal 

 takes care of himself as soon as he begins to 

 live. He has nothing to learn, and his ca- 

 reer is a simple repetition of the careers of 

 countless ancestors. With him heredity is 

 everything, and his individual experience is 

 next to nothing. FISKE Destiny of Man, ch. 

 4, p. 39. ( H. M. & Co., 1900. ) 



1482. HEREDITY IN ASTRONOMIC 



RESEARCH The Younger Carries on the Re- 

 searches of the Elder Herschel. In his 

 special line as a celestial explorer of the 

 most comprehensive type, Sir William Her- 

 schel had but one legitimate successor, and 

 that successor was his son. John Frederick 

 William Herschel was born at Slough, 

 March 17, 1792, graduated with the highest 

 honors from St. John's College, Cambridge, 

 in 1813, and entered upon legal studies with 

 a view to being called to the bar. But his 

 share in an early compact with Peacock and 



Babbage, " to do their best to leave the 

 world wiser than they found it," was not 

 thus to be fulfilled. The acquaintance of 

 Dr. Wollaston decided his scientific voca- 

 tion. . . . 



The full results of [Sir John] Herschel's 

 journey to the Cape were not made public 

 until 1847, when a splendid volume embody- 

 ing them was brought out at the expense of 

 the Duke of Northumberland. They form a 

 sequel to his father's labors such as the in- 

 vestigations of one man have rarely received 

 from those of another. What the elder ob- 

 server did for the northern heavens, the 

 younger did for the southern. CLERKE 

 History of Astronomy, pt. i, ch. 2, pp. 54, 

 56. (Bl., 1893.) 



1483. HEREDITY MAY TRANSMIT 

 PREDISPOSITION TO , DISEASE Environ- 

 ment a Predisposing Cause. We know from 

 experience that a full measure of health is- 

 not often the happy condition of human tis- 

 sues; we have, in short, a variety of circum- 

 stances which, as we say, predispose the indi- 

 vidual to disease. One of the commonest 

 forms of predisposition is that due to hered- 

 ity. Probably it is true that what are known 

 as hereditary diseases are due far more to a 

 hereditary predisposition than to any trans- 

 mission of the virus itself in any form. 

 Antecedent disease predisposes the tissues 

 to form a nidus for bacteria; conditions of 

 environment or personal habits frequently 

 act in the same way. Damp soils must be 

 held responsible for many disasters to 

 health, not directly, but indirectly, by pre- 

 disposition; dusty trades and injurious oc- 

 cupations have a similar effect. Any one of 

 these three different influences may in a ' 

 variety of ways affect the tissues and in- 

 crease their susceptibility to disease. Not 

 infrequently we may get them combined. 

 NEWMAN Bacteria, ch. 8, p. 268. (G. P. P., 

 1899.) 



1484. HEREDITY OF ACQUIRED 

 CHARACTERS Cope's Advocacy of the Doc- 

 trine. Cope early adopted the doctrine of 

 transmutation of species, and recognized the 

 truth that all the animals of the present 

 epoch are descendants from those of past 

 times, with modifications which separate 

 them as species, and eventually as represent- 

 atives of genera, of families and orders dif- 

 fering from the earlier ones as we retrace 

 the steps of time farther and farther back. 

 He was not, however, satisfied with Dar- 

 win's theory, and denied that natural selec- 

 tion was a sufficient factor for differentia- 

 tion. He would not admit that animals 

 were passive subjects and that the slight 

 variations which were manifest in the prog- 

 eny of species were sufficient to enable Na- 

 ture to select from and to fit for future 

 conditions. He contended that the voli- 

 tion and endeavors of an animal had much 

 to do with future progeny as well as its 

 own brief life. In short, he claimed that 

 characters acquired by animals through 

 their own efforts, or forced on them by vari- 



