Heredity 59 



hundred heredities are combined, or to put it another way, 

 each individual alive has received in ten generations of 

 ancestry over five hundred different strains of character, and 

 in twenty generations over five hundred thousand indi- 

 viduals are involved as ancestors; with the evident con- 

 sequence that many of them must be in some relationship, 

 and that a few centuries serve to disperse any character 

 among a whole race within the geographical limits. Thus 

 while a new ability may be a family property for a short 

 time, it soon becomes a tribal or national or racial one if 

 it is of value to survive. And again a new disability or lack 

 of capacity is soon corrected by the influx to the blood of 

 the corrective surplus of other strains. 



It is seen in biology that the qualities and capacities and 

 organs are the result of continued additions and improve- 

 ments in a cumulative growth under the law of heredity. 

 This fact, when conduct is in question, places the beneficial 

 results in a positive or real group, and harmful or defective 

 results in a negative or deficient group. A good inheritance 

 is mainly a sufficient equipment of tested organs and capaci- 

 ties in actual efficiency, and a bad inheritance is a group in 

 which some such are lacking, or imperfectly endowed. In 

 other words bad inheritance is not usually an endowment of 

 actual positive evil, but rather a partial omission of some 

 things, in an equipment which in the main is good. When 

 we consider how much of good heredity is still perceptible 

 in the person known to be defective, this becomes more 

 clear. The proper working of all the organs of assimila- 

 tion, locomotion, propagation, etc., the proper form and 

 coloring of all the limbs and features and adornments, the 



