THE EMBKYOLOGY OF THE SOUL. 143 



inherits from both his parents peculiarities of character, 

 temperament, talent, acuteness of sense, and strength 

 of will. It is equally well known that even psychic 

 qualities are often (if not always) transmitted from 

 grandparents by heredity — often, in fact, a man 

 resembles his grandparents more than his parents in 

 certain respects ; and that is true both of bodily and 

 mental features. All the chief laws of heredity which 

 I first formulated in my General Morphology, and then 

 popularised in my Natural History of Creation, are 

 just as valid and universal in their application to 

 psychic phenomena as to bo.iily structure — in fact, 

 they are frequently more striking and conspicuous 

 in the former than in the latter. 



However, the great province of heredity, to the 

 inestimable importance of which Darwin first opened 

 our eyes in 1859, is thickly beset with obscure 

 problems and physiological difficulties. We dare 

 not claim, even after forty years of research, that all 

 its aspects are clear to us. Yet we have done so 

 much that we can confidently speak of heredity as 

 a physiological function of the organism, which is 

 directly connected with the faculty of generation ; 

 and we must reduce it, like all other vital pheno- 

 mena, to exclusively physical and chemical processes, 

 to the mechanics of the protoplasm. We now know 

 accurately enough the process of impregnation itself ; 

 we know that in it the nucleus of the spermatozoon 

 contributes the qualities of the male parent, and the 

 nucleus of the ovum gives the qualities of the mother, 

 to the newly-born stem-cell. The blending of the 

 two nuclei is the "physiological moment" of 

 heredity ; by it the personal features of both body 

 and soul are transmitted to the new individual. 



