"Heredity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... earth people dig up names like Belinda Mary?" he mused. "Belinda Mary must be rather a weird little animal—the Lord forgive me for speaking so about my betters! If heredity counts for anything she ought to be something between a head waiter and a pack of cards. Have you ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... Leacock's humour is British by heredity; but he has caught something of the spirit of American humour by force of association. This puts him in a similar position to that in which I found myself once when I took the liberty of swimming across a rather large loch in Scotland. After climbing into the boat I was in the act of drying ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... 'th' little lass o' Lord's,' as the villagers called her, was one of those phenomenal child personalities which now and again visit this world as though to defy all laws of heredity, and remind the selfish and the mighty of that kingdom in which the little one is ruler. A bright, bonny, light-haired girl—the vital feelings of delight pulsed through all her being. Born amid the moorlands, cradled in the heather, nourished on the breezy ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... this utterance, and it filled her with a sort of weird wonder as at a revelation of heredity. Mrs. Hicks had ever been taciturn before her, and now this rapid outpouring of thoughts and phrases echoed like the very speech of the dead. Thus had Clement talked, and the girl dimly marvelled without ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... have had something askew in my heredity, I know lots of authoresses who would have jumped at me. I can't do anything wildly adventurous in the Middle Ages or the Revolutionary period, because I'm so afraid; but I know that in the course of modern life I've always been fairly equal to emergencies, and ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... brother across the river said confidentially to a friend that he was going to launch on the community "a legitimate sensation"—a boys' choir. My plans for getting the poor people to church succeeded. Such a thing as fraternizing the steady goers—goers by habit and heredity—and the unsteady goers—goers by the need of the soul—was impossible. The most surprising thing in these evening meetings to the men who financed the church was the fact that these poor people paid for their own extras. That goes a long way ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... The Scarlet Letter is The House of the Seven Gables. This has been called a romance of heredity, because the story shows the fulfillment of a curse upon the distant descendants of the wrongdoer, old Judge Pyncheon. The present inhabitants of the Pyncheon mansion, who are among the worst sufferers, are Hepzibah Pyncheon and her brother Clifford. Hawthorne's pages contain nothing ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... bodies, and they too often have weak and inadequate bodies. Beautiful spirits cannot always make their bodies beautiful, and evil people have often very lovely shapes and faces. I confess I find all that very mysterious; heredity is quite beyond me. If it were merely confined to the body and even the mind, I should not wonder at it, but it seems to affect the soul as well. Who can feel free in will, if that is the case? And now, too, they say with some certainty that it seems ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... observed, is not purely fatalistic) that a family, owing to some hideous crime or impiety in early days, is doomed in later days to continue a career of portentous calamities and sins. Shakespeare, indeed, does not appear to have taken much interest in heredity, or to have attached much importance to it. (See, however, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... a few months ago I was a guest at a dinner party at which men only were present, and that I was seated next to a very brilliant young American physician who was devoting himself especially to the study of Heredity. It being his hobby, he soon contrived to turn the conversation toward that topic, and, after a few general remarks, told several very startling stories illustrative of certain contentions which he advanced. Among others he related the case of a young Western farmer whose ancestors had emigrated ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... where so many monarchs have encountered tempests, be for him a place of repose! Devoted subjects, let us crowd to the feet of our well-loved sovereign, let us recognize in him the model of honor, the living principle of our laws, the soul of our monarchical society; let us bless a guardian heredity, and may legitimacy without pangs give birth to a new King! Let our soldiers cover with their flags the father of the Duke of Angouleme. May watchful Europe, may the factions, if such there be still, see in the accord of all ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... young. It is often that way with women. The attack of pneumonia which came upon Parasang was not, the doctors told me, vicious enough to overthrow an ordinary man. I suppose it was merely that this man's life capital had run out. There is a great deal in heredity. Sometimes I think that each child is born with just such a capital and vitality, something which could be represented in figures if we knew how to do it; and that, though it is affected to an extent by ways of living, the amount ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... in Manitoba. The fact that in Canada less than 2% of the children sent out proved failures confirmed Barnardo's conviction that "if the children of the slums can be removed from their surroundings early enough, and can be kept sufficiently long under training, heredity counts for little, environment for almost everything." In 1899 the various institutions and organizations were legally incorporated under the title of "The National Association for the reclamation of Destitute Waif Children," ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... ever knew; and who later felt the magic of the world of books; and, still later, the need of expression, an expression which finally showed itself in a masterly interpretation of country life and experiences. The same heredity here, the same environment, the same opportunities—yet how different the result! The farmer has tended and gathered many a crop from the old place since they were boys, but has been blind and deaf to all that has there yielded such a harvest to the other. That other, ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... characteristics with which heredity endows the individuals of a race constitute the genius of the race. When, however, a certain number of these individuals are gathered together in a crowd for purposes of action, observation proves that, from the mere fact of their being assembled, there result certain new psychological ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... Crile has offered a mechanistic interpretation of war and peace based on studies of the chemical changes which men undergo in warfare. Crile comes to the conclusion, however, that war is an action pattern, fixed in the social heredity of the national group, and not a type of behavior ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... a life noble in spite of environment and heredity, and a struggle against odds which will appeal to all who love the elements of strength in life. The handicap is the weight which both the appealing heroine and hero of this story bear up under, and, carrying which, ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... Fluctuations are superficial and of little significance; but mutations, if they occur, involve deep-seated, fundamental factors, factors more or less responsive to the environment, but not called into being by it. Of the four factors in the Darwinian formula,—variation, heredity, the struggle, and natural selection,—variation is the most negligible; it furnishes an insufficient handle for selection to take hold of. Something more radical must lead the way to ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... differing from one another. Just as the different forms of bodily disease teach us a great deal about the body—its degree of strength, its forms of organization and function, its limitations, its heredity, the inter-connection of its parts, etc.—so mental diseases teach us much about the normal mind. This gives another sphere of information which constitutes "Abnormal Psychology" ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... would be explained if we could know our real genealogy. For, since the elements which make a man are limited, should not the same combinations reproduce themselves? Thus heredity is a just principle which ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... VICTORIA recorded in her Journal in the Highlands that 'Vicky sat down on a wasps' nest.' 'VICKY,' of course, was destined later to be the mother of WILHELM II. Can we not see in the present situation rather a remarkable example of heredity?—Yours, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... a factor in evolution as to keep it in ignorance of radiation or capillary attraction. Even if you make a religion of Natural Selection, and teach the child to regard itself as the irresponsible prey of its circumstances and appetites (or its heredity as you will perhaps call them), you will none the less find that its appetites are stimulated by your encouragement and daunted by your discouragement; that one of its appetites is an appetite for perfection; that if you discourage this appetite and encourage the cruder acquisitive ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... European amateurs who have never seen it. Unconscious artists tracing with steady hand on a background of lacquer or of porcelain traditional designs learned by heart, or transmitted to their brains by a process of heredity through thousands of years; automatic painters, whose storks are similar to those of M. Sucre, with the inevitable little rocks, or little butterflies eternally the same. The least of these illuminators, with his insignificant, eyeless face, possesses ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... happy blending of soul and mentality. Heredity seemed to have done its best for her. The Gaelic fire and the brilliance and irresponsibility of her misguided father seemed to have been balanced and tempered by the gentle woman soul of her mother. And through the eyes of both she gazed ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... good stuff in the ranks," he replied, "as ever came out of them. The law of heredity is almost as unreliable as the law of variation. Everything rises out of the mud, and everything ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... rich; he contented himself with not understanding them; he endured them; every one, in his opinion, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labor. He had been, he said, a fervent disciple of Saint-Simon, but that mistake must be attributed to his youth: modern society could have no other basis than heredity. An ardent Catholic, like all men from the Comtat, he went to the earliest morning masses, and thus concealed his piety. Like other philanthropists, he practised a sordid economy, and gave to the poor his time, his legal advice, his eloquence, and such money as he extracted ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... me, as they would have disquieted in my place any other nerve specialist. I recognised a symptom of the disease which, by the fatal laws of heredity, menaced my friend, and which had appeared ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... in explaining the reasons for Luther's "defection" from Rome. They apply to Luther's stubborn resistance the law of heredity: Luther's wildness was congenital. Some have declared him the illegitimate child of a Bohemian heretic, others, the oaf of a witch, still others, a changeling of ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... others to a good deal that was latent in the Marchesino. She could never again meet him, or any man of his type, with the complete and masterful simplicity of ignorant childhood that can innocently coquet by instinct, that can manage by heredity from Eve, but that does not understand thoroughly, either, what it is doing or why it is ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... the probable future of the human species" under the laws of selection, is highly interesting and noteworthy. The other and shorter essay discusses a special point, and brings out a corollary of the law of heredity which may not have been thought of before, but which is perfectly clear as soon as it is stated. It explains at once why contagious or epidemic diseases are most fatal at their first appearance, and less so afterward: not by the dying out of a virus—for, when the disease reaches a new population, ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... emotion. The finer tendrils of his being might have shivered, ready to shrivel, as at a touch of frost, in the cool ironical atmosphere which the girl had created around her. But Doggie was not such a young man. Such passions as heredity had endowed him with had been drugged by training. No tales of immortal love had ever fired his blood. Once, somewhere abroad, the unprincipled McPhail found him reading Manon Lescaut—he had bought a cheap copy haphazard—and taking the delectable volume out of his hands, asked him what ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... been already manifested by bringing her to the hospitable roof of the Huberts, where, under the shadow of the Cathedral, she could lead a life of submission, of purity, and of faith. She often heard within her soul the grumblings of heredity tendency to evil, and asked herself what would have become of her had she been left on her native soil. Without doubt she would have been bad; while here, in this blessed corner of the earth, she had grown up free from temptation, strong and healthy. Was it not grace that ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... ignorance. But it may equally well express the fact that the present moment of a living body does not find its explanation in the moment immediately before, that all the past of the organism must be added to that moment, its heredity—in fact, the whole of a very long history. In the second of these two hypotheses, not in the first, is really expressed the present state of the biological sciences, as well as their direction. As for the idea that the living body might be treated by some superhuman calculator ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... is of little consequence that this "vague tradition" was stoutly contradicted by the President's father, the ignorant Thomas, who indignantly denied that either a Puritan or a Quaker could be found in the line of his forbears, and who certainly seemed to set heredity at defiance if such were the case. But while thus repudiating others, Thomas himself was in some danger of being repudiated; for so pained have some persons been by the necessity of recognizing Thomas Lincoln as ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... born deficient in any of her bodily organs, they could have made allowance for her, and would have deemed it cruel to have demanded that she should have performed the same amount of labor with one hand that she could have done with both. They knew nothing of heredity, except its effects, which they were not thoughtful enough to trace back to the causes over which Annette had no control, and instead of trying to counteract them as one might strive to do in a case of inherited physical tendencies, ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... forms of chance were represented there: the Papal benediction by the cardinals, some of whom had witnessed the coronation of Napoleon; victory by the marshals; heredity by the Duke d'Angouleme, dauphin; happiness by M. de Talleyrand, lame but able to get about; the rising and falling of stocks by M. de Villele; joy by the birds that were released and flew away, and the knaves in a pack of playing-cards by ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... drawn, turned, shaped, by a woman! He may deny it. He may swagger and lie about it. Heredity, ambition, lust, noble aspirations, weak self-indulgence, power, failure, success, have their turns with him. But the woman he desires above all others, whose breast is his true ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... first effect of which is, while developing the spirit of doubt and investigation, to break down subordination to the king, to the gentleman, to the noble, and, in general, to dissolve society founded on heredity. Such phenomena are already observable everywhere, the ruin of feeble corporations by the state, its constant tendency to interference, to the absorption of every special service and the descent of power into the hands of a numerical majority.—What plan, then, governs these societies in ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... was at once pointed out by Diderot. This error, however, was not essential to the general theory of the immeasurable power of social institutions over human character, and other thinkers did not fall into it. All alike, indeed, were blind to the factor of heredity. But the theory in its collective application contains a truth which nineteenth century critics, biassed by their studies in heredity, have been prone to overlook. The social inheritance of ideas and emotions to which the individual is submitted from infancy is more ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... pleased, kept his head well. There is a great deal in heredity, and his father had not been Maurice Oakley's butler for so ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... of spring morning in their posture and gait, were only typical of the greater brilliance and glory of their soul. Likewise excuseless is any man in our time who makes lifelong alliance with any one who, because of her disposition, or heredity, or habits, or intellectual vanity, or moral twistification, may be said to be of ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... the appearance of this feeble old man, one would hardly think that he was once a rollicking scrapper, with ready fists like rawhide mallets. Old Dave dutifully gives full credit to the law of heredity. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... love Clayton? She could see no reason why she could not. Jane was not coldly calculating by nature, but training, environment and heredity had all combined to teach her to reason even in matters of ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Carry courage. Her hand shook a little as she put down her teacup, for she was shy of taking the initiative. "I think I know what she would say. In our time it would probably have been different, on account of the family—and heredity; but Mabel is a modern girl. And a modern girl would say that she isn't to marry the father but the son. She loves him, so I'm certain she would never give him up. Therefore is ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... a creature of Heredity and Environment. He is by Heredity what his ancestors have made him (or what God has made him). Up to the moment of his birth he has had nothing to do with the formation of his character. As Professor Tyndall says, "that was done for ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... one morning, was amused to notice that I always progressed by dancing along the curbstone sideways, my face turned inwards and my arms beating against my legs, conversing loudly all the time. This was a case of pure heredity, for so he used to go to his school, forty years before, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... finish the story of Inez, that is, as far as I can. As I have shown she was always a woman of melancholy and religious temperament, qualities that seemed to grow upon her after her return to health. Certainly the religion did, for continually she was engaged in prayer, a development with which heredity may have had something to do, since after he became a reformed character and grew unsettled in his mind, her ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... it places the inferior race in a despised and abject position, there is no prohibition of illicit unions nor any such moral feeling or principle as would tend to restrict them. The ideas of the responsibilities and duties of parentage in connection with heredity, or the science of eugenics, are entirely modern, and have no place at all in ancient society. As racial and religious distinctions fade away, and social progress takes place, a fresh set of divisions by wealth and occupation grows ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... "a funny man," for all his subtlety and love of humour; he is a combination of the artistic, with a distinct and clear sense of beauty, and of the scientific, with speculations and theories of race and heredity—who would as lief draw East-End types for the sake of their "character," and would look at a queer face more for the interest that is in it than for its comicality. If Mr. du Maurier's sense of beauty is strong, so is his appreciation ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... too, that, in the breeding of domestic animals, the great facts of heredity and variation could not fail to have been noticed, and must have given rise to reflection and speculation. The selection of the best animals for breeding purposes, and the consequent improvement of their stock, may well have suggested the transmutation of one kind of animal ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... divine, collaborate in the divine plan, comes to make up for the imperfection of the vehicles, and they permit only what is necessary to come to each one—only what he has deserved, as is generally said: this hand can create a physical or a psychic malady even where heredity and environment could not supply it, just as it can preserve a pure soul from the moral infection of the surroundings into which it is thrown.[76] This is the reason we find that heredity and environment either ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... of your children under the laws of heredity. It is doubtful whether you have a right to increase the number of invalids ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... ascended the throne on March 25, 718, and the purple descended to his family, by the rights of heredity, for three generations. The Isaurian dynasty is most notable for the part it played in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... risk. Reflectively weighing the chances for and against, he made sure that in characterizing the young woman whose life-thread had been so strangely tangled with his own he had not overrated her intelligence. Giving heredity its due, with the keen-witted little physician for her father she could scarcely fail to measure up to the standard of those whose gifts are apperceptive. For many days she had had ample opportunity to familiarize herself ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... organisms on which the theory of descent, with modifications, is based, the fruit of which was a series of papers published in 1882 under the title of "Studies on the Theory of Descent"; but it is with the discussions on the question of heredity that his name is most intimately associated. The accepted theory on the subject assumes that characters acquired by the individual are transmitted to offspring, and this assumption, in his "Essays upon Heredity," he maintains to be wholly groundless, and denies that it has any foundation in fact; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... say I gather—that he belongs to the industrial class. But of course that is precisely the class that Jane springs from. Odd! Is it not? Heredity, I presume." She raised ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... criticism of Wuthering Heights is not to be surpassed or otherwise gainsaid) finds in it a tragedy of inherited evil. She thinks that Emily Bronte was greatly swayed by the doctrine of heredity. "'No use,' she seems to be saying, 'in waiting for the children of evil parents to grow, of their own will and unassisted, straight and noble. The very quality of their will is as inherited as their eyes and hair. Heathcliff is no ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... Daoud The Adventure of the Virtuous Spinster What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Second Gift of the Emir The Adventure of William Hicks What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Third Gift of the Emir The Adventure of Norah Sullivan and the Student of Heredity What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Fourth Gift of the Emir The Pleasant Adventures of Dr. McDill What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Fifth Gift of the Emir The Adventure of Miss Clarissa Dawson What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Sixth ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... children, blind them, make them deaf to all sound, cut away their voices. They are identical twins, facing the same environment, sharing the same heredity of blasted chromosomes. They will have intelligence and curiosity that increases as they mature. They will not be blinded by the senses—the easy way. The first thing they will ...
— Now We Are Three • Joe L. Hensley
... contained several small, round pieces of metal. He had played with them many times in the years gone by; but always he replaced them carefully in the bag, and the bag in the cupboard, upon the very shelf where first he had discovered it. In strange ways did heredity manifest itself in the ape-man. Come of an orderly race, he himself was orderly without knowing why. The apes dropped things wherever their interest in them waned—in the tall grass or from the high-flung branches of the trees. What they dropped ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... from his parents. But even if that were true the injustice of one being born a genius and another a fool would remain. It is the fact of inequality that constitutes the injustice, and it is of no importance whether it comes about through heredity or otherwise. But as a matter of fact heredity is confined to the physical side of existence. As more and more is learned by observation the old theory of mental and moral heredity has lost ground until it can be said that it now has no recognition in the scientific world. ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... thy Prince's son, and let him find In broad America a worthy bride. Thus let the ties of blood together bind The Anglo-Saxon race on either side The great Atlantic. Keep thy princes free From royal Europe's mad heredity. ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... heredity dragged the Southerners who lingered into war. It was a sacrifice of half of the splendid generation which fought ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... nature, Franklin none the less felt growing in his heart the stubbornness of the man of property, the landholding man, the man who even unconsciously plans a home, resolved to cling to that which he has taken of the earth's surface for his own. Heredity, civilization, that which we call common sense, won the victory. Though he saw his own face in the primeval mirror here held up to him, Franklin turned away. It was sure to him that he must set his influence against this unorganized ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... History Pathology Changes in the Bursa Changes in the Cartilage Changes in the Tendon Changes in the Bone Causes Heredity Compression Concussion A Weak Navicular Bone An Irregular Blood-supply to the Bone Senile Decay Symptoms and Diagnosis Differential Diagnosis ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... Joslyn Gage, Ellen H. Sheldon, Caroline B. Winslow, M. D., editor of The Alpha, and Rev. Olympia Brown. The president of the association, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, received many invitations to speak at various points, but had time only for the "Moral Education," "Heredity," and "Free Religious" associations. Her engagement at Parker Memorial Hall, prevented her from accepting the governor's invitation, but Isabella Beecher Hooker and Susan B Anthony led the way to the State house and introduced the delegates ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... brought up a noisy room, is constantly talked to and fondled, is likely to develop prematurely, to talk and walk at an early age; also to fall into nervous decay at an early age. And even if by reason of an unusually good heredity he escapes these dangers, it is almost certain that his intellectual power is not so great in adult life as it would have been under more favorable conditions. A new baby, like a young plant, requires darkness and ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... Germany, or of Italy, but the numerous feudal lords. Against the invasions of the Norman, Saracen, and Hungarian plunderers, the kings and the counts proved themselves incapable of defending territory or people. Meantime, the principle of heredity—the principle that benefices should go down from father to son, or to the next heir—had gained a firm footing. Another fact was that the royal offices became hereditary, and were transmitted to the heirs of allodial property. Thus the exercise ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... for the incarnation of the soul of a race. The body of the national soul may be spiritual or secular, aristocratic or democratic, civil or militarist predominantly. One or other will be most powerful, and the body of the race will by reflex action affect its soul, even as through heredity the inherited tendencies and passions of the flesh affect the indwelling spirit. Our brooding over the infant State must be dual, concerned not only with the body but the soul. When we essay self-government in Ireland our first ideas will, in all probability, be borrowed from the Mother of ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... be broadly stated that the Daika reformation, which formed the basis of this legislation, was a transition from the Japanese system of heredity to the Chinese system of morality. The penal law (ritsu), although its Chinese original has not survived for purposes of comparison, was undoubtedly copied from the work of the Tang legislators, the only modification being in degrees of punishment; but the code, though it, too, was partially ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of the new consciousness which came to Tolstoi a few years later, was born into existence through these terrible struggles and mental agonies, inevitable because of the very nature of his heredity and education and environment. Although as we know, he came of gentle-folk, there was much of the Russian peasant in Tolstoi's makeup. His organism, both as to physical and mental elements, was like a piece of solid iron, untempered by the refining processes of an inherent ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... was from this person, thought I, that I inherited my rather nasty temper and other moral and mental infirmities. I gazed at the lady long and earnestly, for as an ardent believer in heredity I felt that here I had the key to a problem which often worried me. I resolved to look her up at ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... be born without much innate tendency to crime. After all, it is mostly a matter of heredity; these unfortunates are less culpable than their neglectful ancestors; and it is a fault that none need really blush for in the present. For such as they there still remains the example of the turnpike-loving ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... began to fail, her husband was vexed rather than surprised. He knew Alma's characteristic weakness, and did not like to be so strongly reminded of it. For about this time he was reading and musing much on questions of heredity. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... influence the good or ill fortune of his descendants. It is something to be proud of, to be the son of a good man; it helps to success in life. On the other hand, to have had a father of ill reputation is a very serious obstacle to success of any kind in countries where the influence of heredity is ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... tell; for it is during the period of adolescence that hereditary characteristics show themselves. Up to this time the child is a child of the race; during this period it becomes the offspring of its parents. And the factors of heredity—father, mother, ancestry—are mingling and clashing and combining with the factors of environment, and what the outcome is going to be, nobody knows, in specific cases, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... understand, which seems almost a better title to recognition on the part of the world. It didn't strike you so before? Well, it seems to me that choice has got more right to be respected than heredity or law. Moreover, Mme. de Lastaola," she continued in an insinuating voice, "that most rare and fascinating young woman is, as a friend like you cannot deny, outside legality altogether. Even in that she is an exceptional creature. For she is ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... field-dogs for close covert work and the reasons for not breaking such dogs on quail. Then the question of cross-breeding came up, and he gave his opinion on the qualities of "droppers." To which she replied, sleepily; and the conversation veered again toward the mystery of heredity, and the hopelessness of escape from its laws as illustrated now by the Sagamore pup, galloping nose in the wind, having scented afar the ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... avoid the reproach of interfering. Seeing in time how little he had in common with them—it was by them he first observed it; they proclaimed it with complete humility—his companion was moved to speculate on the mysteries of transmission, the far jumps of heredity. Where his detachment from most of the things they represented had come from was more than an observer could say—it certainly had burrowed under ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... us to attempt as far as may be to account for man on the basis of his heredity or of his environment. It is interesting to note that both of these factors in Darwin's case were entirely favorable. In the latter part of the eighteenth century Erasmus Darwin had given to the world an astonishing poem in which he anticipated not a little of the thought which his ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... sidewalk. Advancing with many a stumble through the blasted rock and shale, he obtained ingress to an alleyway in the rear. Following this brought him to the back of the Somerset. Shirley had an obstinate grandfather, and heredity was strong upon him. It seemed a foolhardy attempt to scale the big structure, but he raised the ladder to the window-sill of the second story, climbing cautiously ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... works or office is that all men are really human beings. The second one is that the meanest one is only so because of certain physical or mental conditions that are the direct result of natural law. Usually it is not necessary to drag in heredity, for we find ample cause in his environment, within our range ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... "Heredity is a queer thing. You may be Aztecan over again, in mind and temperament; and every one knows how impressions are transmitted. If features and traits of character, why not particular thoughts ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... coming more and more to recognize some unknown factor in evolution, probably some unknowable factor. The four factors of Osborn—heredity, ontogeny, environment, selection—play upon and modify endlessly the new form when it is started, but what about the original start? Whence comes this inborn momentum, this evolutionary send-off? What or who set the ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... heredity is intimately bound up with the evolutionary hypothesis and, it must be admitted, creates a new difficulty for the acceptance of the theory. Indeed, the laws of heredity, so far as understood, appear to contradict the theory of Lamarck and Darwin at ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... are my daughter," she exclaimed. "You are one of the freaks of heredity. I'm perfectly certain you don't belong to me, and as ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Causes.—Heredity. More frequent in males. Women sometimes suffer from them during pregnancy. Usually occurs between the ages of twenty-five and fifty. Sedentary life, irregular habits, high-grade wines and liquors, hot and highly seasoned and stimulating foods. Heavy lifting. Those who must remain on their feet ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... men know what is right and what is wrong, and have power to choose the right."[884] "Man becomes that which he is by the action of forces outside himself."[885] "All human actions are ruled by heredity and environment. Man is not responsible for his heredity and environment. Therefore all blame and all punishment are unjust. Blame and punishment, besides ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... reiterated, when the pleasure of obeying a command and satisfying a caprice is begged for, when roses are strewn, and even necks put down in the path, one forgets to be humble; one forgets that in meekness alone lies the sole good; one confuses deserts with the hazards of heredity. ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... circumstances, and cannot be expected to act otherwise than he does? Shall we liken evildoers generally, as at present is customary in certain quarters, to the sick? Shall we say that such men are the outcome of their heredity, their education, their environment? I have known of a husband who in a state of intoxication brutally struck and injured his wife, while she was holding in her arms a babe not eight days old. Shall we say that that man was morally sick, that he could not help becoming ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... Crescent and the land of "OM," anything like freedom of the human spirit is probably very rare and very difficult. The difference does not arise from any lesser stringency in the claims of Christianity to spiritual dominion, but rather, I imagine, from a deep-seated divergence in racial heredity. We Western Aryans have behind us the serene and splendid rationalisms of Greece and Rome. We are accustomed from childhood to the knowledge that our civilization was founded by two mighty aristocracies of intellect, to whom the religions of their day were, as they are to us, nothing but ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... the Prince. "Has not the nation every right to know the opinions of its possible future King? Never shall it be said that Jingalo accepted me blindly under the dark cover of heredity." ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... crossing, which, in one case, resulted in the drowning of a team of horses, seemed to be every-day incidents in the life of these heroic missionaries, who are carrying on this noble work among the Indians. The two Riggs brothers, whose heredity as well as personal consecration fit them for large usefulness in the Indian work, were especially rich in experience and inspiring in conference. One thing, especially, impressed me in this Indian work, and that was, the difference in character ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 9, September, 1889 • Various
... heredity, of transmission of ancestral poison, is as operative in the male sex as in the female. A pure and healthy offspring must be preceded by a pure and healthy parentage. A rottening tree never produces luscious fruit. "Like begets like." An enfeebled father means not only feebleness in the next generation, ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... hand in the new country. The children were taught that manual labor was honorable, and that agriculture was worthy of being prosecuted by the best of men. The seven sons and three sons-in-law were all successful farmers, and heredity no doubt ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... formed on the same type. One sees this illustrated by generations in the same family holding much the same religious or political opinions and showing the same aptitude for certain professions, games, and pursuits. Much there is in heredity, but probably there is ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... is that acquisitiveness is generosity inverted," concluded Mr. Aston thoughtfully, "and that heredity is merely a danger signal, though it may mean fighting. I believe you can do it, my dear boy, but it is ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... is steadily growing, among both physicians and biologists, that this attitude has caused a serious, if not vital, misconception of the influence of that great conservative and preservative force of nature—heredity. We hear a great deal of hereditary disease, hereditary defect, hereditary insanity, but very little of hereditary powers of recovery, of inherited vigor, and the fact that ninety-nine and seven-tenths per cent ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... being assassinated, is invariably boiled to loosen the hair. By long usage the custom of getting into hot water has become a habit which the living pig inherits from the dead pork. (See Herbert Spencer on "Heredity.") ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... dishonesty.—So deeply does the vice of dishonesty eat into the moral nature that mental and moral deterioration is handed down to offspring. The scientific study of heredity shows that the deterioration resulting from this cause is more sure and fatal than that following many forms of insanity. The son or daughter of a mean, dishonest man is handicapped with tendencies toward moral ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... against the Stuarts. Our revolution grew out of the English as the French grew out of ours, and in putting on his seal Cromwell's motto, "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God," Jefferson, the Virginian, illustrated the same intellectual heredity which Samuel Adams, the New Englander, showed in asserting the right of the people composing the Commonwealth to resist the supreme authority when in their judgment its exercise had become prejudicial to their ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... to take a drink, take it and go about your business, but don't associate together for the purpose of drinking, whether for a night or for an hour. You will read, before the long life that is before you ends, a hundred ways of accounting for drunkards—heredity, inclination, regular drinking, grief, disappointed love, and all that sort of thing, but all put together they do not begin to approximate the cause I tell you of,—"associating together." It is the associating together of boys, the late nights, the early morning ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... indeed delayed. Walls at length appear and when they do come they are like those of the lily; they are cellulose. The myxomycetes may be regarded as a section of the organic world in which the forces of heredity are at a maximum whatever those forces may be. Slime-moulds have in smallest degree responded to the stimulus of environment. They have, it is true, escaped the sea, the fresh waters in part, and become adapted to habitation on dry land, but nothing more. It is instructive ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... life that uprooted him from the congenial environments of New England and the career opening so temptingly before him, to transplant him to Missouri, there to become the father of a youth, who, by all laws of heredity and by the peculiar tang of his genius, should have been born and nurtured amid the stern scenes and fixed customs of Puritan New England. That story must be told ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... the first step in his or her reclamation." The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, after thirty years of investigation of cases involving the social and moral welfare of over half a million of children, has also come to the conclusion that environment is stronger than heredity. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink. But if I had mentioned that fragment of family information without any ethical preface, people would have begun at once to talk nonsense about artistic heredity and Celtic weakness, and would have gained the general impression that Bernard Shaw was an Irish wastrel and the child of Irish wastrels. Whereas it is the whole point of the matter that Bernard Shaw ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... for the origin of the cerebral condition of the boy may be attributed to heredity and to the father's chronic ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... be loved and not feared, and in every country they struggled against the ignorance and brutality of the masses, bringing about progressive reforms by royal enactment and even by force. But the great evil of the monarchical system was its heredity, the power settled in one family, for the son of a clever man with good intentions might be an imbecile. After Charles III. came Charles IV., and as if this were not sufficient, in the year of his death the French revolution broke out, which made all the kings in Europe ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the creature of heredity and environment. He can only rise superior to circumstances by bringing God into environment of which ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... selection," can have nothing to do with the vast assemblage of infusorial and cryptogamic organisms, until they assume definitely recurring forms, that is, rise into species and breed true to nature. Then, he agrees with Mr. Darwin, that the law of vital polarity or "heredity," as he calls it, may come in and play its part towards effecting evolution, or variability, in both animal and vegetal organisms, but not before. Why then should he lug in, or attempt to lug in, the diverse potentialities of this word "evolution," for the purpose of demonstrating ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... Biology 4: Bird Course; Biology 5: Tree Course; Biology 6: Bacteriology and Fermentation; Biology 7: Biology of Sex; Heredity and Eugenics; Biology 8: Biology and Education; Biology 9: ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... "adaptation" and "heredity," the basic principles of evolution, have been steadily at work, and slowly there has come about a differentiation of cell function, an apportionment among the different cells of ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton
... some house other than the Hanoverian, there is, of course, no occasion for such an act, and the throne may be expected to continue to pass from one member of the present royal family to another in strict accordance with the principles of heredity and primogeniture. The rules of descent are essentially identical with those governing the inheritance of real property at common law.[61] Regularly, the sovereign's eldest son, the Prince of Wales,[62] inherits. If he be not alive, the inheritance passes to ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... was to stay there all night. She also indulged in dreary prognostications concerning her future, and finally driving her small fry before her, closed the street door with a bang which induced Mrs. Wheeler to speak of heredity and ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... should have developed an abnormal imagination that in Wuthering Heights is as powerful as Poe's at his best, and another should have matured into the ablest woman novelist of her day and her generation? These are freaks of heredity which science utterly fails ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... must seek elsewhere for special attention to the points which Butler regarded as the essentials of "Life and Habit." In 1893 Henry P. Orr, Professor of Biology in the University of Louisiana, published a little book entitled "A Theory of Heredity." Herein he insists on the nervous control of the whole body, and on the transmission to the reproductive cells of such stimuli, received by the body, as will guide them on their path until they shall have acquired ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... than a handful to meet—everything, every one that belongs to me, that touches me near or far; my family, my blood, my heredity, my traditions, my promises, my circumstances, my prejudices; my little past—such as it is; my great future—such as it has been supposed ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... of his invalid wife bored him, and he turned at once to Ann Veronica. "And where are YOU going?" he said. "Are you going on again this winter with that scientific work of yours? It's an instance of heredity, I suppose." For a moment Mr. Stanley almost liked Ramage. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... the children of science are;—a physical fact in a world of physical facts; a man who rises, if ever, by miracle, to a higher set of facts; who thinks the thought of his father, who does the deed of his father's father, who contests the heredity of his mother, who shuts the pressure of his special education like a clasp about his nature, and locks it down with the iron experience ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... malignant surroundings, and had been taught to regard the Marquis of Montrose as the first of Scotsmen and the most heroic of martyrs. Although the senior of Claverhouse by two years, he had been with him at St. Andrew's University, and knew him well, but in spite of his heredity Pollock had ever carried a more open mind than Graham. During his university days he had heard the saint and scholar of the Covenant, Samuel Rutherford, who was principal and professor in the university and a most distinguished ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... individual as a guide to conduct. He thought that, if each human being were free to act as he chose, he would be sure to act for the best; for, according to him, instincts do not exist. He makes no allowance for the influence of the past in forming the present, ignoring the laws of heredity. A man's character is formed by the nature of his surroundings. Virtue and vice are the result not of innate tendencies, but of external circumstances. When these are perfected, evil will necessarily disappear from the world. He had so successfully subordinated his ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... it, as the price of it. The rights, advantages, capital, knowledge, and all other goods which we inherit from past generations have been won by the struggles and sufferings of past generations; and the fact that the race lives, though men die, and that the race can by heredity accumulate within some cycle its victories over Nature, is one of the facts which make civilization possible. The struggles of the race as a whole produce the possessions of the race as a whole. Something for nothing is not to be found ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... Phelps's case, one must believe in heredity and partly in Huxley's statement that "we are automata propelled by our ancestors." Her grandfather, Moses Stuart, was Professor of Sacred Literature at Andover, a teacher of Greek and Latin, and a believer in that stern school of theology and teleology. It was ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... vacant years that were really no dates at all. The things I have suffered—prisons, scourgings, beating with rods, wild masters, in bounds often, a hundred lines often, standing on forms and holding out books often—on account of these dates! I knew, and knew well before I was fifteen, what these "heredity" babblers are only beginning to discover—that the past is the curse of the present. But I never knew my dates—never. And I marvel now that all little boys do not grow up to be Republicans, seeing how much they suffer for the mere ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... and adepts in the ways of the forest, when the red men, silent and tenacious, followed upon their tracks for days and it was necessary to practise every art to throw off the pursuers, unseen but known to be there. Unconsciously a thin strain of heredity now came into play, and he began to wind about the city before going home, turning suddenly from one street into another, and gliding swiftly now and then in the darkest shadow, making it difficult for pursuer, if pursuer ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... great scientific discoveries are made, and more are promised. Geology once unsettled people about Genesis; but closer study of the Bible and of science has given truer views of both, and thinking people are as little troubled about geology now as about Copernican astronomy. At present heredity and psychology are dominating our minds—or, rather, theories as to both; for though beginnings have been made, the stage has not yet been reached of very wide or certain discovery. There is still a great deal of the soul unexplored and unmapped. No reasonable person would wish to ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... Dorado of health and nature beauty. Groves and dunes and flora vie with the blues of ocean and sky in resting the eye and in filling the soul with that harmony which is said to make for sound living. Yet to a child, Fred's schoolmates are experts on patent medicines and on the heredity that is alleged to be responsible for bad temper, running sores, tuberculosis, anaemia, and weak eyes. Freddie is particularly favored. His well-to-do parents have supplied him with ponies, games, and bicycles. Nothing prevents his breathing salt air fresh from the north pole but hermetically ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... the new psychology against the old superstition of innate ideas. A modern thinker in his place would advance Weissmann's biological theory that the acquired modifications of an organism are not inherited, as an answer to the pessimism which bases itself upon heredity. ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... 'Dartrey's mother was Lady Charlotte Kiltorne, one of the Clanconans; better mother than wife, perhaps; and no reproach on her, not a shadow; only she made the General's Bank-notes fly black paper. And—if you 're for heredity—the queer point is, that Simeon, whose mother was a sober-minded woman, has always been the spendthrift. Dartrey married one of the Hennen women, all an odd lot, all handsome. I met her once. Colney said, she came up here with a special ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... are plastic. Both body and mind are susceptible to surrounding influences. If the heredity is unfavorable it can be largely modified by favorable environments. If a child is born of unhealthy parents, but without any serious defect, and is intelligently cared for after birth, it will grow up to be healthy. On the other hand, a child born of healthy parents that ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... dear old lady" with calm eyes and level brows, "astonishingly well informed" and immensely proud of her pretty daughter. She was not assertive and while I knew nothing of Mr. Habberton, she somehow conveyed the impression that if there was anything in Mendel's theory of the working of heredity she and her six daughters went a long way toward exemplifying it. There was a genuineness about the pair which was distinctly refreshing to Jack's jaded tastes in fashionable feminine fripperies and he fell into the conversation ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... bar-counters for so many hours of their lives; the development of the right wrist being attributed in the same way to the number of glasses their fathers have lifted with it. This, if authenticated by scientific evidence, would be an interesting example of heredity, but I suspect it to be an exaggeration. The bar-room in the hotel at Kandy was certainly of vast dimensions, and was continuously packed to overflowing during the cricket week, and an unusual notice conspicuously ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... consider little matters of descent, though by this time he ought to know all about "damnable heredity." As a general rule he keeps himself very far from the negro, and says things about him that are not pretty. There are six million negroes, more or less, in the States, and they are increasing. The American, once having made them citizens, cannot unmake them. He says, in his newspapers, they ought ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... nights of midnight oil, all the books I had read, all the wisdom I had gathered, went glimmering before the ape and tiger in me that crawled up from the abysm of my heredity, atavistic, competitive and brutal, lustful with strength and desire to ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... Shay" as his most typical work. Yet his best poems are as pathetic as "The Last Leaf," as sentimental as "The Voiceless," as patriotic as "Old Ironsides," as worshipful as the "Hymn of Trust," as nobly didactic as "The Chambered Nautilus"; his novels are studies of the obscure problems of heredity, and his most characteristic prose work, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, is an original commentary on almost ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Hamilton is ever associated the names of England's most famous sailor and of one of her most famous painters. Hers was a life redolent of ill-repute. Though her beauty was great, it served her for ill purposes; but she came by her lack of character by heredity. She was born in 1761, the daughter of a female servant named Harte, and at the age of thirteen was put to service as a nurse in the house of a Mr. Thomas of Hawarden, Flintshire. She found tending children a tedious task, and forsook it. At sixteen, she went to London, and became a lady's maid ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... in an uncontrollable frenzy, caught the whip from my brother's hand and slashed the horse in wild delirium, unconscious of what I was doing. The emotion remains uneffaceable after more than threescore years, one of the most vivid of my life. It was a rapture and an interesting case of heredity, for I had not before been within a hundred and fifty miles ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... employed to bring young people together, and "unostentatiously to give them practical counsel, conveying their remarks tactfully, and in such a way as not to awaken the spirit of contradiction found in youthful minds;" paying due regard, moreover, to theories of eugenics and heredity. The Winged Boy disguised as an antique German professor ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... were lovers on earth, until he perceived Beatrice's added beauty. Amid revolving lights Charles Martel of Hungary appeared, denounced his brother Robert of Sicily, and instructed Dante on the subjects of heredity and degeneracy; that "sweet seed can come bitter" because the influence of the star under which the child is born can counteract that of the parent, and because his state is not always adapted to him ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... right to discuss freely whether our ancestors were apes; let it be as free to ask whether our posterity shall be idiots, dwarfs, and knaves, and if not, by what change, if any, in our social institutions, such wretched results may be avoided. Gatton in his work on "Heredity," says our present civilization is growing too complicated for our best minds even to grasp, and to meet successfully the issues of the hour, humanity must be lifted up a few degrees, as speedily as possible. And where ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... seems to exist for its own sake. In Canada ideas are not needed to make parties, for these can live by heredity, and, like the Guelfs and Ghibellines of mediaeval Italy, by memories of past combats; attachment to leaders of such striking gifts and long careers as were Sir John Macdonald and Sir Wilfrid Laurier, created a ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... principal portions of the road to evolution. This law, which establishes the natural connection of the individual with the whole chain of organisms, is continued in a psychogenetic law, not founded on the heredity of the blood but on the heredity of culture (and therefore quite independent of the doctrine of the origin of species). In the course of his development the individual repeats the psycho-spiritual ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... evolution is firmly established. The publication of the Origin of Species, in 1859, converted it from a poet's dream and philosopher's speculation to a well-demonstrated scientific theory. Evolution, heredity, environment, have become household words, and their application to history has influenced every one who has had to trace the development of a people, the growth of an institution, or the establishment of a cause. Other scientific theories and methods have affected physical ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... age, to polish his own boots, yet he is now, mentally and physically, a man fit for anything— I can only reply, in the words of Portia, that I fear me my lady his mother played false with a smith. But this, again, would be claiming too much for heredity, at the expense of training. Remember, however, that our present subject is not the 'gentleman' of actual life. He is an unknown and elusive quantity, merging insensibly into saint or scoundrel, sage or ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... gripping each other, each heart pounding on the other's breast, it was with a pulsing that spoke in the torrent their lips dammed, and between the two even in this farewell embrace was the rifle which stood emblematical of the man's life and mission and heredity. Its cold metal lay in a line between their warm breasts, separating, yet uniting them, and they clung to each other across its rigid barrel, as a man and woman may cling with the child between them which belongs to both, and makes them one. As yet, she had shed no tears. Then, he mounted and ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... fathers visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation may in heredity account for much, but I want to see through the mystery of a good father at times having a bad son, as also of one showing genius and splendid faculties—the offspring of parentage the reverse of anything suggesting qualities contributive ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... to Darwin's theory that anything more should be assumed than the facts of heredity, variation, and unlimited multiplication; and the validity of the deductive reasoning as to the effect of the last (that is, of the struggle for existence which it involves) upon the varieties resulting from the operation of the former. Nor is it essential ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... his mother. One of her ancestors was a Margravine of Saxony. His father was a Tammany brave. On account of the dilution of his heredity he found that he could neither become a reigning potentate nor get a job in the City Hall. So he opened a restaurant. He was a man full of thought and reading. The business gave him a living, though he gave it little attention. One side ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... rationale of heredity and atavism. That the same things apply to our ordinary conduct is apparent from the notorious ease with which "habits,"—bad or good, as the case may be—are acquired, and it will not be questioned that this applies, as a rule, as much to the moral and intellectual, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... are beginning to realize that heredity is not the sole factor moulding human character. Climate, food, occupation; nay, color, light, and sound must be considered in ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... of our being which provides that a man shall resemble his grandfather—or not. The Bach family has supplied the believers in heredity more good raw material in way of argument than any dozen other ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... of these distant relatives enjoying the favor of successive English kings must have suggested the contrast of his own life; but he was pleased with the fancy that their musical genius had come to him through heredity, for it confirmed his opinion that "if a man made himself an expert in any particular branch of human activity there would result the strong tendency that a peculiar aptitude towards the same branch would be found among some of ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... is neither dead nor fast dying. There is a change in the cities, but it does not reach far inland. In how many Southern States are the same privileges extended to both races in schools? in cars? in hotels? in churches? This prejudice is in the blood. Heredity and training have both fostered it. Race prejudices die slowly. For centuries the contest between Patrician and Plebeian was carried on in ancient Rome. The subject-class never affiliated with the master-class. Two or three hundred ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., May, 1888., No. 5 • Various
... Mr. Chester warned Quin again and again that he was not supposed to emerge from the obscurity of his humble position as shipping clerk. But Quin was the descendant of a long line of missionaries whose duty it was to reform. The effect of his heredity and early environment was not only to increase his self-reliance and intensify his motive power, but to commit him to ideals as well. Once he recognized a condition as being capable of improvement, he could not rest until he ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... take our superior and conscious faculties, set them apart, and call them "ourselves"; refusing responsibility for the more animal and less fortunate tendencies and instincts which surge up with such distressing ease and frequency from the deeps, by attributing these to nature or heredity. Indeed, more and more does it become plain that the sophisticated surface-mind which alone we usually recognize is the smallest, the least developed, and in some respects still the least important ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... basis of comparison is very unjust to the negro and very hurtful to his teacher. We must not forget heredity; we must compare the negro as to education in schools in 1884 with 1864. The white man has behind him a thousand years of the influences that enter into our best education. Yet how much he has to learn! How much easier for white pupils to learn books than virtue—how much easier to acquire knowledge ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 08, August, 1885 • Various
... accidental homicide in order to appease the ghost of the dead man, which might otherwise become a cause of harm, the course of justice, if one may call it such, deviates from what the enlightened man must regard as normal. The belief that sin is an infection, communicable by heredity or even by contact, must lead to similar aberrations of primitive justice. Animals, and even material things, have, and not by peoples the most primitive, been treated as rational, responsible and amenable ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... the cost of his fortune; his mother, for whom death had been a blessing; his grandparents and his uncles, in whom no man had found any good. But most of all he cursed himself, for whose follies even heredity might not wholly account. He recalled the school where he had made no friends, the University where he had taken no degree. Since he had left Oxford, his aimless, hopeless life, profligate, but dishonourable, perhaps, ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton |
