42 
HEREDITARY INFLUENCE. 
serve his Judaic character while living among Austrians or 
English, is little more remarkable than that the Englishman 
should preserve his Anglo-Saxon type while living among 
oxen and sheep ; so long as no intermarriage takes place, no 
important change in the race can take place, because a race 
is simply the continual transmission of organisms. The 
Scotchman “ caught young,” as Johnson wittily said, will 
lose some of the superficial characteristics, but will retain all 
the national peculiarities of his race ; and so will the Irishman. 
“We know,” says Mr. Spencer, “that there are warlike, 
peaceful, nomadic, maritime, hunting, commercial races — 
races that are independent or slavish, active or slothful ; we 
know that many of these, if not all, have a common origin ; 
and hence there can be no question that these varieties of 
disposition have been gradually induced and established in 
successive generations, and have become organic.” This, 
indeed, is evident a priori : we have already seen that the 
instincts and habits, even the trifling peculiarities of an indi- 
vidual, have a tendency to become transmitted ; and what is 
true of the individual is true of the race.* 
It is owing to the transmission of incidentally acquired 
characters that every great movement in human affairs 
achieves much more than its immediate object. It tends to 
cultivate the race. How could that new, unheard-of feeling 
for the wives, widows, and orphans of soldiers, which so 
honorably distinguished the war just closed, have ever arisen, 
had not the sympathetic feelings of the race been cultivated 
during centuries of slow evolution? How could Englishmen 
manifest their sturdy political independence, their ineradi- 
cable love of liberty so strikingly contrasted with the want 
of that feeling in other nations, had not our whole history 
been one bequeathed struggle against the encroachments of 
governments ? It is, however, needless to continue : wher- 
ever we look in physiological, psychological, or sociological 
questions, we are certain to observe the operation of the laws 
of Hereditary Transmission. — Westminster Review. 
* M. Gosse, in a recently published c Essai sur les Deformations artifi- 
cielles du Crane’ (Geneva, 1855), shows that the forms artificially impressed 
on the skull during successive generations tend to become hereditary, and 
that, consequently, we must assign less value than has been hitherto 
assigned to those characteristics of distinct races which the forms of the 
skull have supplied. 
