716 
HEREDITARY INFLUENCE. 
present state of knowledge, and which must be steadily 
borne in mind in all inquiries into Hereditary Influence : 
1st. Heritage is constant: it is a law of organized beings 
that the organization of parents should be transmitted to 
their offspring. 
2d. The offspring directly represents both parents, and 
indirectly it represents its ancestors. 
3d. The offspring never represents its parents with ab- 
solute equality, although it represents them in every organ. 
Sometimes one parent predominates in one system, some- 
times in another, sometimes in all. 
4th. The causes of this predominance are various, some 
being connected with “ potency ” of race, or individual supe- 
riority in age, vigour, &c. ; others being, in the present state 
of know ledge, not recognisable. 
Leaving these facts without any hypothetical explanation 
for the present, let us pass on to a consideration of the mean- 
ing of the Law of Variation, which we have seen to be so per- 
turbing an influence. Like produces like : that is the Law 
of Constancy. But we see it producing unlike , and the varia- 
tion must have its cause. Development, whether taking 
place in a simple tissue or in the whole organism, must 
proximately arise from some alteration in the series of organic 
combinations. A cellular tissue would never develop into a 
nerve tissue, unless some new element were introduced into 
its composition. A whole dynasty of blockheads would never 
produce a man of genius by intermarriage with blockheads ; 
the intermarriage must introduce “new blood.” There is 
no chance in Nature. If two parents produce a child which 
is unlike them both, this child is not an accident : the un- 
likeness consists in the new combination of old elements. 
The cipher which stood before the numeral, thus, 01, has 
been transposed, and we have 10 as the result. Nature 
transposes in this way. Out of several elements of carbon, 
hydrogen, and oxygen, in the same proportions, she will 
arrange substances so various as starch, gum, and sugar. 
We need not be surprised, then, if, with elements so complex 
as those of an organism, a great variety of combination is 
produced ; and, far from marvelling because children some- 
times are unlike their parents, the marvel truly is that they 
are ever like them. 
The old theories could make nothing of these variations ; 
they quietly ignored them. The once dominant, and still 
famous, theory of the “ pre-existence of germs,” which 
lingers in the popular expression of the “oak being con- 
tained in the acorn,” maintained that the embryo is the ani- 
