HEREDITY IN PHYSIOLOGY, IN MEDICINE, ETC. 351 
ing imaginations, extraordinary capacities for the arts, for 
poetry, for composition, which are not in the slightest de- 
gree derived from transmission! We need not look very 
far for proofs. Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, Meyerbeer, 
Ingres, Delacroix, Mérimée, Henry Regnault,’ not to in- 
stance the living, exhibited talents for which they are not 
in the least indebted to their forefathers. The history of 
savants, properly so called, shows us the share of heredity 
still further reduced. Families of savants are cited. How 
many of them are there? A dozen at most. On the other 
hand, how many famous savants are there among whose 
forefathers we find either mere commonplace people, or 
else people noted for talents very different from those that 
distinguish the savant! Where are the ancestral influ- 
ences that have formed a Cuvier, a Biot, a Fresnel, a Magen- 
die, an Ampére, a Blainville, a Gay-Lussac? It is plain 
that in this matter innateness and education have taken the 
chief part. Neither is the life of literary men at all more 
accordant with the claims of the thorough partisans of he- 
redity. 
1“T believe that the sun which shines on you is not the same as ours,” 
he wrote from Tangiers, ‘‘and I am terrified on seeing afar the moment 
when I must once again in Europe look on the mournful aspect of houses 
and crowds; but before returning thither I intend to make the real 
Moors live once again—then Tunis, Egypt, India. I shall soar from en- 
thusiasm to enthusiasm, I shall be intoxicated with wonders, until, trans- 
ported and ecstatic, I shall be able to fall back again into our dull and 
commonplace world, without fearing lest my eyes lose the light they will 
have drunk in for two or three years. Whenever, once more in Paris, I 
shall long for clear vision, I shall need only to close my eyes, and then 
Moriscos, Fellahs, Hindoos, granite colossi, white-marble elephants, fairy 
palaces, plains of gold and lakes of azure, and diamond cities, the whole 
East will pass again in procession before me. Oh, what an intoxication 
is light!”—“ Correspondence of Henry Regnault,” collected by M. Ar- 
thur Duparc, 1872. 5; 
Assuredly these thoughts and emotions were not hereditary in Henry 
Regnault. 
