HEREDITY IN PHYSIOLOGY, IN MEDICINE, ETC. 339 
bodily dispositions, is a very common though not a uni- 
form phenomenon among animals and in man. 
Transmission by descent of individual peculiarities in 
the order of intellect or the affections, and heredity in 
predisposition to some one or other moral or speculative 
activity, are also phenomena sometimes remarked, but not 
so commonly as the foregoing ones. When we review the. 
series of instances and proofs collected and appealed to by 
some authors, we are struck, it is true, by the seeming 
strength of these arguments, and we are ready to concede 
to heredity a very large share in the development of the 
intellect and character in the genesis of the thinking indi- 
vidual. We failto see, or we forget, the prodigious num- 
ber of facts that bear witness the contrary way. The illu- 
sions of that mirage have not been without their use, in 
the sense that they have induced very interesting re- 
searches, but they would be a source of danger did they 
lead the public to put faith in the conclusions drawn 
by some authors from these investigations. We will 
briefly point out the real advantage to be gained from 
these researches, and will attempt to disprove the infer- 
ences. 
According to Galton, the faculty of memory in the 
family of Richard Porson, the famous Greek scholar, was 
so wonderful that it had passed into a byword—‘* the Por- 
son memory.” Lady Esther Stanhope, who led so advent- 
urous 2 life, notes, among many points of likeness between 
herself and her grandfather, that of the memory. “I have 
my grandfather’s gray eyes and his memory for places,” she 
says. “If he saw a stone on the road, he recollected it, 
and I do thesame; his eyes, dull and without expression 
at ordinary times, blazed with a startling light as mine do 
when sudden emotion seized him.” The creative and im- 
aginative faculties, which take a dominant part in poetry 
and the arts, sometimes pass down from father to son. 
