HEREDITY, VARIATION AND 

 GENIUS. 



i. 



Everybody is what he typically is because his 

 progenitors were what they were, like having 

 begotten its like ; he inherits the form, traits and 

 qualities of the stock from which he proceeds. 

 In the molecular structure of the minute germ of 

 him, with its millions of constituent atoms and 

 their ordered mazes of intricate motions, lurked 

 the predispositions or plans of his essential struc- 

 ture, form and qualities : in that little book were 

 all his members written when as yet there were 

 none of them. That is an opinion which, based on 

 the experience of all the world, emerges plainly in 

 such popular sayings as that he comes of a good 

 stock, that eagles do not breed doves, that one 

 cannot gather grapes off thorns or figs off thistles, 

 that what is bred in the bone will out in the 

 flesh, and in the old Hebrew proverb — not quite 

 baseless perhaps although savagely denounced by 

 Isaiah — that when the fathers have eaten sour 

 grapes the children's teeth are set on edge ; 

 wherein lies truly not the broad statement of a 

 general law of heredity only but also a just appre- 

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