FACTS OP INHERITANCE 175 



In spite of what Galton and other careful workers 

 have said, it is persistently asserted that noble 

 and illustrious families usually end in sterihty — 

 a mistake largely due to ignoring the female Unes 

 of descent. 



Inheritance of Moral Character. — In the 

 development of " character " much depends upon 

 early nurture, education, and surrounding in- 

 fluences generally, but how the individual reacts to 

 these must largely depend on his inheritance. 

 Truly the individual himself makes his own 

 character, but what does that mean but the 

 habitual adjustment of an hereditarily determined 

 constitution to surrounding influence ? Nurture 

 supphes the stimulus for the expression of the 

 moral inheritance, and how far the inheritance 

 can express itself depends on the nurture-stimuli 

 available just as surely as the result of nurture is 

 conditioned by the hereditarily determined nature 

 on which it operates. It may be urged that 

 character, being a product of habitual modes of 

 feeling, thinking, and acting, cannot be spoken of 

 as inherited, but bodily character is similarly a 

 product dependent upon vital experience. Some 

 children are " born good " of " born bad," just 

 as some children are bom strong and others weak, 

 some energetic and others " tired " or " old." 



It is entirely useless to boggle over the difficulty 

 that we are unable to conceive how dispositions for 

 good or ill lie imphcit within the protoplasmic unit 

 in which the individual hfe begins. The fact is 

 undoubted that the initiatives of moral character 

 are in some degree transmissible, though, from the 

 nature of the case, the influences of education, 

 example, environment, and the like, are here more 



