"Heredity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... interesting to watch heredity at play. Given the inclination to write, what kind of a first book should we get from the son of one of the most cultured and sensitive classical scholars and translators of this or any day and from the grandson ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... 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 own emotions, that in his philosophical ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... raise the mass above its own level, the more convinced I am that my nurse was right. Progress can do nothing but make the most of us all as we are, and that most would clearly not be enough even if those who are already raised out of the lowest abysses would allow the others a chance. The bubble of Heredity has been pricked: the certainty that acquirements are negligible as elements in practical heredity has demolished the hopes of the educationists as well as the terrors of the degeneracy mongers; and we know now that there is no hereditary "governing ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... men of twenty-four can go very deeply into questions of heredity. Of what follows here much was not known to Paul. Much that he did know he would have interpreted differently. The old well at Stone Ridge, for instance, had no place in his recital; and yet out of it sprang the history of his shorn generation. Had Paul's mother grown up in a houseful of brothers ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... French life and applied it in studying American life, as one uses certain algebraic formulae to solve certain problems. It is perhaps the only truthful literary method of dealing with that part of society which environment and heredity hedge about like the walls of a prison. It is true that Mr. Norris now and then allows his "method" to become too prominent, that his restraint savors of constraint, yet he has written a true story of the people, courageous, dramatic, full of matter and ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... heredity," stated the colonel, whose live-stock operations were based on heredity. "Jim's a scrub, I suppose; but he acts as if he might turn out to ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... 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 ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... without like a hound in the leash, could note a slight accentuation in the perfect English spoken by Ooma. There was just a suspicion of the liquid "r" so strongly marked in Jiro's utterance. What an uncanny thing is heredity! It even alters the shape of the roof of the mouth. The Japanese of English descent could necessarily pronounce English better than ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... think," he continues, "that the most urgent problem confronting the philosophic biologist is the construction of a theory of life which will harmonize the facts of individuality with the appearance of the continuity of all life, with the theory of progressive evolution, and with the facts of heredity and biparental reproduction." [Footnote: McDougall, Body and ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... wrote his own memoirs in Lavengro and Romany Rye tells us that he had no creative faculty—an absurd proposition. But I think we may accept the contest between Ben Brain and Thomas Borrow, and what a revelation of heredity that impressive death-bed scene may be counted. Borrow on one occasion in later life declared that his favourite hooks were the Bible and the Newgate Calendar. We know that he specialised on the Bible and Prize-Fighting in no ordinary fashion—and ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... Yes—there is an article here on heredity that you must read. It has some reference to what we began ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... authority for the intellectually feeble; but he accepted the main dogmas himself, being satisfied of them by intuition and reason. Protestantism, he held, was not for the ordinary person, considering "the natural imbecility of man's wits and understandings." His piety was a thing apart, a matter of heredity perhaps, and of his poetic temperament. I have heard him called by that abused name, "mystic." He was nothing of the sort, and he said so in memorable words. As an act of devotion he translated the Adhering to God of Albertus Magnus. In the ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... forgotten, but I do not know how much of a load they would bring with them into the world. We called it heredity, the Hindoos called it karma, and, though that is different, educators called ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... was in business, Mr. Witherby was socially a dull man; and his wife and daughter seemed to partake of his qualities by affinition and heredity. They tried to make something of Marcia, but they failed through their want of art. Mrs. Witherby, finding the wife of her husband's assistant in Miss Kingsbury's house, conceived an awe of her, which Marcia would not have known how to abate if she had ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... dinner. Cake on special fete-days as an extra. The boys do credit to their rations, and show by their bright faces and energy their good health and spirits. They are under strict military discipline, and both by training and heredity have a military bias. There is no compulsion exercised, but fully 90 per cent. of those who are eligible finally enter the army; and the school record shows a long list of commissioned and non-commissioned officers, and even ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... Definition 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
... That in a succeeding generation Mr. Chadwick's estimate of a possible mortality of five per thousand would be realised, I have no reasonable doubt, since the almost unrecognised, though potent, influence of heredity in disease would immediately lessen in intensity, and the healthier parents would ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson
... heredity and the origin of genius find but scanty illustration in the case of Haydn. Unlike the ancestors of Bach and Beethoven and Mozart, his family, so far as the pedigrees show, had as little of genius, musical or other, in their ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... above record leads to the conclusion that there is very little difference in plant and animal cells and it seems clear that certain old, underlying principles must be dealt with. I need not refer to heredity because, while it is undoubtedly quite possible, perhaps, to influence heredity tendencies so as to get stocks to accept scions more readily, it is not the major issue for most of us just now. Next spring we will take what heredity has given us and be satisfied. However, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... found her sitting on the floor in the library, reading a book she had taken from one of the lower shelves. It was a book of Sir Shadwell Rock's on the heredity of vice. I took it from her gently, remarking as I did so: "I would rather you did not read ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... 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 ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... can. His native gift, his temperament,—this is what it is; and what it is it must be; and no man can better it by any effort. His character, also, the personality of the artist, that which gives a large meaning to his work,—how little can any man control this result of heredity and environment? ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... has drawn under a very thin pseudonym a striking portrait of a clergyman who, with his environment, plays a considerable part in the social agreeableness of London at the present moment. Is social agreeableness a hereditary gift? Nowadays, when everything, good or bad, is referred to heredity, one is inclined to say that it must be; and, though no training could supply the gift where Nature had withheld it, yet a judicious education can develop a social faculty which ancestry has transmitted. It is recorded, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... philosophical, and esthetical training that belongs to the higher education. This training is the great instrument for the present upbuilding of the race which is to do so much in laying foundations for the fine heredity every race covets. I repeat that the seeds of culture are to be sown by the educated Negro and in the home they are ...
— The Educated Negro and His Mission - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 8 • W. S. Scarborough
... your veins; and, in the very act of denying sympathy with their conduct, you own kindred. And, for all your protestations, spiritual kindred goes with bodily descent.' Christ here recognises that children probably 'take after their parents,' or, in modern scientific terms, that 'heredity' is the law, and that it works more surely in the transmission of evil than ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... be doing you an injustice in suggesting that you who read may also have your little snobberies. But I confess that I should like to cross-examine you. If in conversation with you, on the subject (let us say) of heredity, a subject to which you had devoted a good deal of study, I took it for granted that you had read Ommany's Approximations, would you make it quite clear to me that you had not read it? Or would you let me carry ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... contravening God's law to resist it. It is ever thus; where Theology enchains the soul, the Tyrant enslaves the body. But can any one, who has any knowledge of the laws that govern our being—of heredity and pre-natal influences—be astonished that our jails and prisons are filled with criminals, and our hospitals with sickly specimens of humanity? As long as the mothers of the race are subject to such unhappy conditions, it can never be materially improved. Men exhibit some common sense in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... 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 up. But though this happened also in the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... apply, solely, to the particular means by which the change of species has been brought about, not to the fact of that change. The objectors seek to minimise the agency of natural selection and to subordinate it to laws of variation, of use and disuse, of intelligence, and of heredity. These views and objections are urged with much force and more confidence, and for the most part by the modern school of laboratory naturalists, to whom the peculiarities and distinctions of species, as such, their ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... established, it is clear that they cannot be regarded as the first stage in the maternal family. Such a view is entirely to mistake the facts. The Nairs are in no respect a people of primitive culture. Through a long period they have most strictly preserved the custom of matriarchal heredity, which has led to an unusual concentration of the family group, and it is probable that here is the best explanation of the conjugal liberty of the Nair girls. However singular their system may appear to us, it is the ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... over, yet they are probably 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 still more ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... have been left far in the rear they lose hope and ambition, and give up. Thenceforward, if left to their own resources, they are the victims, not the masters, of their environment; and it is a bad master. They drag one another always farther down. The bad environment becomes the heredity of the next generation. Then, given the crowd, you have the ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... Heredity was absolutely denied. The mother is living and made a natural impression. The father died at 65, nine months before patient's admission, of cardio-renal disease. Two brothers and one sister died of acute diseases. One sister died in childbirth. Three brothers ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... 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 of government and the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... strong by use; your brother's are weak by disuse. But do use and disuse make any difference to the race? That is the theoretical question which, above all others, complicates and hampers our present-day attempts to understand heredity. ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... a sailors' boarding-house. Heredity also conferred upon it the dignity of "hotel." Furthermore, its licence carried with it the privileges of a saloon. But its claims were by no means exhausted by ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... examined to some extent the religions of other nations. He finds in other creeds all the excellencies that are in his own, and most of the mistakes. In this way he learns that all creeds have been produced by men, and that their differences have been accounted for by race, climate, heredity—that is to say, by a difference in circumstances. So we now know that the cause of Liberalism is the cause of civilization. Unless the race is to be a failure, the cause of Liberalism must succeed. Consequently, I have the same faith ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... very rich," Mrs. Rosscott pursued calmly; "and you know the law of heredity is an established scientific fact now, so you could feel quite safe as to her nose ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... on 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. ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... and heredity in this matter are evils, but they are evils of long standing. We have only to look back to the reigns of St. Louis, when offices were already paid for, and of the great Francis, who erected the principle into a regular traffic, to see that so inveterate a custom ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... we marvel if, after leaving generation after generation to grow up uneducated and underfed, there should be developed a heredity of incapacity, and that thousands of dull-witted people should be born into the world, disinherited before their birth of their share in ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... rather than expressed. Once or twice I had heard Corbeck speak of the fiery energy of his youth; but, save for the noble words of Margaret when she had spoken of Queen Tera's hope—which coming from his daughter made possible a belief that her power was in some sense due to heredity—I had seen no marked sign of it. But now his words, sweeping before them like a torrent all antagonistic thought, gave me a new idea ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... absolute certainty of regular meals just now appeals. They get three meals a day going with the current, and four while tracking back, with meals thrown in when anything unusual happens or a moose is killed. One cannot help wondering how that elastic term "the law of heredity" works out with these people, cut off from the lives their fathers led and from the free woods-life of the ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... exception of heredity, the question of stimulants and narcotics in their relation to the physical welfare of the race is second to none in importance. With trifling exceptions, the whole world is addicted to their use. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... exhausted emotions, his superficial cleverness, his engrossing middle-age, and especially of his approaching baldness. Was love, after all, he questioned, only a re-quickened memory in particular brain cells as modern scientists believed? Was physical heredity, in truth, the fulfilling of the law of life? and was the soul merely a series of vibrations by which ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... laws of heredity there may be a survival from a more or less remote past phase. In the ordinary, average, or normal case, if the type has varied, the traits of the type are transmitted approximately as they have stood in the recent past—which may be called the hereditary ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... sudden or special creation) of the structure having been proximately due to the operation of physical causes. Thus, for the value of argument, let us assume that natural selection has been satisfactorily established as a cause adequate to account for all these effects. Given the facts of heredity, variation, struggle for existence, and the consequent survival of the fittest, what follows? Why that each step in the prolonged and gradual development of the eye was brought about by the elimination of all the ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... present-day generations are not descended in the direct line from the generations contemporary with the quarryman who lost his as or his obol at this spot. All the circumstances seem to point to it: the Osmia of the quarries is an inveterate user of Snail-shells; so far as heredity is concerned, she knows nothing whatever of reeds. Well, we must place her in the presence of ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... would blot out all the past, and forever be creating something new. It is in the balance of these two tendencies that we discover the orderly growth of the world; and this orderly growth it is which constitutes evolution. Let me illustrate: Here is a tree, for example. The tendency that we call heredity would simply constantly repeat the past: the tendency to vary would vary the tree out of existence. The ideal is that it shall keep its form, for example, as an oak, but that, in the process of growth, the bark shall expand freely and sufficiently ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... and more interested in this child, who had not merely the malodorous reputation of her mother to contend with, but the memory of a traitorous sire to live down; and when Lee Virginia went to her room to pack her bag, the wife turned to her husband and said: "What are we to think of heredity when we see a thoroughly nice girl like that rise out of the union of a ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... examines the detailed results of the various experiments which are described in this book will agree that it is an established fact) cannot be overlooked. It alters our interpretation of the results of training, memory, heredity, and discrimination experiments, and it leads us to suspect that the dancing race is exceedingly unstable. I do not venture to make comparison of my own observations of the dancer's sense equipment with those of Cyon, Rawitz, ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... 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
... which suit us here on earth: fiery spirits should have large phlegmatic 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 ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... this phase of the question. The fact, however, that my cases were culled from various sources and that the anomalous traits manifested by them were already present at an age when environment could hardly have had any lasting influence upon them, leads me to believe that it is heredity that is responsible for the major portion of this anomalous product. However, we shall leave this question to the decision of the practical eugenists. Personally I fully believe that we are dealing here with ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... are soldiers in my family. We have a marshal of France and two officers who died on the field of honor. I have perhaps obeyed a law of heredity. I believe rather that my imagination has carried me away. I saw war through my reveries of epic poetry. In my fancy I dwelt only upon the intoxication of victory, the triumphant flourish of trumpets and women throwing flowers to the ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... gentlemen, English yokels, bush-hands, and the like. After all, the moulding of character by outward influences alone is not a work to be achieved in one generation, or what would become of the theory of heredity, upon which everything is supposed to depend, more or less, in our present scientific age? If these people strike the English reader, therefore, as differing in certain respects from those he is accustomed to meet in his daily walk through life, let him remember that the ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... interests, or that they are brethren. Prejudice 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 years ago a new people was introduced into the north of Ireland. ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., May, 1888., No. 5 • Various
... that is born into the world, when it first conquers its eyesight and compels it to obey its brain. An equal miracle is performed with each sense certainly, but this ordering of sight is perhaps the most stupendous effort. Yet the child does it almost unconsciously, by force of the powerful heredity of habit. No one now is aware that he has ever done it at all; just as we cannot recollect the individual movements which enabled us to walk up a hill a year ago. This arises from the fact that we move and live and have our ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... controversy which preceded the English revolution 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 ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... Calmadys. It happened that studies he had recently made in contemporary science, specially in obtaining theories of biology, had brought home to him what tremendous factors in the development and fate of the individual are both evolution and heredity. At first idly, and as a mere pastime, then with increasing eagerness—in the vague hope his researches might throw light on matters of moment to himself and of personal application—he had tried to trace ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... for fortune to come and lets opportunities for self-help slip by unheeded. The world often exclaims over the failure of the sons of noted men to achieve great things, for, despite confusing evidence, men still have faith in biologic heredity. A too easy fortune saps ambition and relaxes energy; and thus rich men's sons, if not most carefully and wisely trained, are often made paupers in spirit, while the self-made fathers think their boys have better opportunities than they themselves enjoyed. ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... 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 ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... to me, Sir George Campbell's conclusion is exactly the opposite one from the conclusion now being forced upon men of science by a study of the biological and psychological elements in this very complex problem of heredity. So far from considering love as a 'foolish idea,' opposed to the best interests of the race, I believe most competent physiologists and psychologists, especially those of the modern evolutionary school, would regard it rather as an essentially beneficent and conservative instinct ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... match did not distress him at all. A year before it would have broken his heart, but the multiplicity of new interests had changed him entirely. As a matter of fact, he had been long ripe for the change, though he had not known it. As he had matured, the blood of his heredity had begun to clamor for its ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... pleased to consider my 'physical perfection,' one of your relatives, a brother, or say even your son, had met me at Milan as you did; and madly forgetting his family rank, his aristocratic ties, all the pride and worldly wisdom of heredity, had, while in a fit of complete dementia, offered as you have done to clothe my humble obscurity in the splendid name of Laurance? Would General Rene Laurance have pardoned him, and received me as his ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... 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
... I said, with this new idea in my mind. 'Was he the son of your mother's sister?' (A few details as to heredity add materially to the value and instructiveness ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... races are the creatures of circumstances—that they are the products of their social heredity and environment—is to state a commonplace in the accepted doctrines of science to-day. It is therefore perfectly safe to postulate that the greatest circumstance in the life of the Negro before emancipation was the institution of slavery. For it furnished for two and a half centuries both ...
— The Ultimate Criminal - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 17 • Archibald H. Grimke
... On Memory as a Key to the Phenomena of Heredity delivered by Butler at the Working Men's College, Great Ormond Street, on Saturday, ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... as important a fact as is physical heredity. The latter is a factor of immense importance as affecting the constitution and quality of the organism in and through which the soul is required to function. But psychic tradition is that which determines the power and faculty brought to bear upon the physical organism. Past evolution ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... and began picking it to pieces, floret after floret, with twitching fingers. She was deeply moved. "Well, consider his family history," she burst out at last, looking up at me with her large brown eyes as she reached the last petal. "Heredity counts.... And ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... not, crime has its human interest. Its practitioners are still part of life, human beings, different from law-abiding humanity by God-alone-knows-what freak of heredity or kink in brain convolution. I will not ask the reader, as an excuse for my book, to view the criminal with the ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... it cannot be denied that Manders strikes one as a clerical type rather than an individual, while even Oswald might not quite unfairly be described as simply and solely his father's son, an object-lesson in heredity. We cannot be said to know him, individually and intimately, as we know Helmer or Stockmann, Hialmar Ekdal or Gregors Werle. Then, again, there are one or two curious flaws in the play. The question whether ...
— Ghosts • Henrik Ibsen
... whatsoever, except an Indian or a wolf, shall forfeit five shillings for every such shot"; and our pious ancestors popped over many an Indian on their way to Divine worship. [Laughter.] But when in Colorado, settled less than a generation ago, the old New England heredity works itself out and an occasional Indian is peppered, the East raises its hands in horror, and our offending cowboys could not find admittance even to ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... past, quite apart from the arbitrary laws of heredity, makes the road of our future. Possibly this may account for the curious fact that in dreams the setting is often in childhood's surroundings, while the dream itself is obviously of the present or the future. This ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... his eye and pinion, trained For mateship with the sun, twitched at a sting. Amazed to find a "cootie" on his wing, And that the insect dreamed, it was ordained By race heredity to serve the King— He shook his ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... 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 ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... through 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 ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... the 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 with all the little identifying ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... the pigmented areas, and very, very painstakingly verified a theory. It took an electron microscope to do it, but he found a virus in the blue patches which matched the type discovered on Tralee. The Tralee viruses had effects which were passed on from mother to child, and heredity had been charged with the observed results of quasi-living viral particles. And then Calhoun very, very carefully introduced into a virus culture the material he had been growing in a plastic ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... begun," said Bixiou. "Listen, my dear boy. Marriage has been out of favor for some time past; but, apart from the advantages it offers in being the only recognized way of certifying heredity, as it affords a good-looking young man, though penniless, the opportunity of making his fortune in two months, it survives in spite of disadvantages. And there is not the man living who would not repent, sooner or later, of having, ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... taken in connection with the makeshift nest or platform of sticks, is now a disastrous element in the life of the bird. Such of the cuckoos, therefore, as build the more perfect nests, or lay at shortest intervals, will have a distinct advantage over their less provident fellows, and the law of heredity will thus insure the continual survival ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... epoch in ecclesiastical history known as the War of the Iconoclast; but that was only an embodiment of what had transpired before, and what has occurred often since. Iconoclasm is a bias of humanity. It grows out of the constitution of man. He is by heredity a breaker of images. If this view be not fictitious, we must not be surprised if there are developments of this spirit in our era or any era. It is a perennial reappearance. Whether it come in religion, statecraft, economic ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... attentively his earlier works will have perceived that there is really very little that is absolutely new in these doctrines. They are so strictly the development of ideas which are an integral part of him, through heredity, environment, and personal bias, that the only surprise would be that he should not have ended in this way. Community of goods, mutual help, and kindred doctrines are the national birthright of every Russian, often bartered, it is true. But long residence in the country ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... live by our looks for all these centuries, surely the instinct that Professor Theobald thinks himself so penetrating to have discovered in clever women, is accounted for simply enough by heredity," Hadria said to ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... of Heredity has been described as that law of our nature which provides that a man shall resemble his grandmother—or not, as the case ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... couple of girls with trays of coffee cups. "She walks mighty well. I wonder where a girl like that learned to carry herself so finely. By George, she is a good-looker! She's got 'em all beaten; if she was only—. Queer about the accidents of birth, isn't it? Now, what would you say, in her heredity, makes a common girl like that step and look like ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... do not believe in heredity, the fact that Jimmie's great-great-grandfather was a scout for General Washington and hunted deer, and even bear, over exactly the same hills where Jimmie hunted weasels will count for nothing. It will not explain why ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... meant to be only a means to a highest end. Degrading to an animal pleasure that which held in its pure hallowed power the whole future of the race. There is absolutely no change save in the inner thought. But what a horrid heredity in that one flash of the imagination! Every sin lives first in the imagination. The imagination is sin's brooding and birth-place. An inner picture, a lingering glance, a wrong desire, an act—that is the story of every sin. The first step ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... Queen becomes imminent, we must remind ourselves that to the last she refused to recognise any heir, and that there were various claimants, [Footnote: Genealogical Tables; Front. and App. A, iii.] each one with a colourable claim. In point of priority by heredity King James of Scotland unquestionably stood first of the descendants of Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York; yet the fact that he was not only an alien but King of Scotland made him in himself an unwelcome candidate. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... extraordinary collection of papers and manuscripts of all sorts, piled up in confusion and filling every shelf to overflowing. For more than thirty years the doctor had thrown into it every page he wrote, from brief notes to the complete texts of his great works on heredity. Thus it was that his searches here were not always easy. He rummaged patiently among the papers, and when he at last found the one he was ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... the result of training and conviction. Every character is influenced by heredity, environment and education; but these apart, if every man were not to a great extent the architect of his own character, he would be a fatalist, an irresponsible creature of circumstances, which, even the skeptic must confess he is not. ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... 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 ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... observations on the finger-tips of the Japanese have an ethnic bearing and relate to the subject of heredity. Mr. Herschel considers the subject as an agent of Government, he having charge for twenty years of registration offices in India, where he employed finger marks as sign manuals, the object being to prevent personation and repudiation. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... the isolation. Frederick Saw, too, no heir. It is the fate of such, Often, to be denied the common hope As fine for fulness in the rarer gifts That Nature yields them. O my husband long, Will you not purge your soul to value best That high heredity from brain to brain Which supersedes mere sequence of blood, That often vary more from sire to son Than between furthest strangers!... Napoleon's offspring in his like must lie; The second of his line be he who shows Napoleon's ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... may be brought into active growth, and roots induced to grow from the cut surfaces by various means. By this miracle of Nature, an infinite number of plants, in an endless procession, may be propagated from the product of a single seed, each plant complete in its heredity and differing from its fellows only ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... reach a crucial point, though it has usually been overlooked, in the lives of boys and girls, more especially those whose heredity may have been a little tainted or their upbringing a little twisted. For it is here that the transformation of energy and the resulting possibilities of conflict are wont to enter. In the harmoniously developing organism, one may say, there is at this period a gradual ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... system before birth. The animal takes care of himself as soon as he begins to live. He has nothing to learn, and his career is a simple repetition of the careers of countless ancestors. With him heredity is everything, and his individual experience is ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... for him to make the sacrifice of his intelligence. And he was not mistaken; it was indeed his father again springing to life in the depths of his being, and at last obtaining the mastery in that dual heredity in which, during so many years, his mother had dominated. The upper part of his face, his straight, towering brow, seemed to have risen yet higher, whilst the lower part, the small chin, the affectionate mouth, were becoming less distinct. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... appraising survey of the company. The memory of this lorgnette operated with Althea as a sort of social standard; it typified delicacy, dignity, deliberation, a scrupulous regard for the claims of heredity, and a scrupulous avoidance of uncertain or all too certain types. Althea felt that she had carried on the tradition worthily. The lorgnette would have passed all her more recent friends—those made with only its inspiration ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... 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
... a matter of heredity. At middle age the judge and his wife were fully deserving of the high esteem in which they were held by the entire community. They were an honest, honorable, Christian couple, living fully up to the professions they made. In their youthful days they had been different—in some respects. ...
— All He Knew - A Story • John Habberton
... poses. "I have sometimes believed that Jeff Durgin was goin' to turn out a blackguard. He's got it in him. He's as like his gran'father as two peas, and he was an old devil. But you got to account in all these here heredity cases for counteractin' influences. The Durgins are as good as wheat, right along, all of 'em; and I guess Mis' Durgin's mother must have been a pretty good woman too. Mis' Durgin's all right, too, if she has got a will of her own." Whitwell returned from his scientific inquiry ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... heredity is the nearest equivalent that is offered for the whispered refrain: "Ghosts," in the original masterpiece. This hand should also be reiterated as a refrain, three times at least, before this tableau, each time more dreadful and threatening. It appears but the once, and has no chance to become a ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... 1767, in the North Parish of Braintree, since set off as the town of Quincy, in Massachusetts, was born John Quincy Adams. Two streams of as good blood as flowed in the colony mingled in the veins of the infant. If heredity counts for anything he began life with an excellent chance of becoming famous—non sine dis animosus infans. He was called after his great-grandfather on the mother's side, John Quincy, a man of local ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... not be afraid that I am going to enter upon the much discussed subject of heredity, whether in its physiological or psychological aspects. It is a favorite subject just now, and the most curious facts have been brought together of late to illustrate the working of what is called heredity. But the more we know of these ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... designation of "the last forty years as the age of Darwin," for the theory of 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
... to their more powerful neighbours. The very name Hugh was an old ducal name, and there is little doubt that William de Avalon, Hugh's father, claimed kin with the princes of his land. He was a "flower of knighthood" in battles not now known. He was also by heredity of a pious mind. Hugh's mother, Anna, a lovely and wealthy lady, of what stock does not appear, was herself of saintly make. She "worshipped Christ in His limbs," by constantly washing the feet of lepers, filling these wretched outcasts with hope, ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... kept alive meanwhile by the use of powerful antidotes. The heroine of the Guardian Angel inherited lawless instincts from a vein of Indian blood in her ancestry. These two books were studies of certain medico-psychological problems. They preached Dr. Holmes's favorite doctrines of heredity and of the modified nature of moral responsibility by reason of transmitted tendencies which limit the freedom of the will. In Elsie Venner, in particular, the weirdly imaginative and speculative character of the leading motive suggests Hawthorne's method in fiction, but the background ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... is not entirely to blame; rather is it a matter of heredity and environment. Being a girl, it is not natural to her to work systematically. The working woman is a new product; in this country she is hardly three generations old. As yet she is as new to the idea of what it really means to work as is the Afro-American citizen. The ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... common 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 Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... deep and wide, that a brother is born for adversity. The spirit of kin and clan, rooted in remote heredity, outlives other and livelier attachments. It not only survives rude blows, but its true virtue is only extracted by the pestle of tribulation. Having broken with her lover, and turned utterly away from her spiritual ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... another, and therefore the hypothesis as to the origin of species will always remain an hypothesis, and not an experimental fact. And this hypothesis was also erroneous, because the decision of the question as to the origin of species—that they have originated, in consequence of the law of heredity and fitness, in the course of an interminably long time—is no solution at all, but merely a re-statement of the problem in ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... Indian fighters 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 he had, ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... struggle with inanimate nature-we may group the causes of social morality in man. How has morality been fostered by the tribe? Social morality, like personal morality, is passed on from generation to generation by heredity and by imitation. Both, in historic man, are also deliberately cultivated by the tribe. We have discriminated between the two aspects of morality for theoretic reasons which will later become apparent; but no discrimination is ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... of the States of the Pope. He explained the reasons of this to his minister in a long letter, which was to serve as a basis for Champagny's report, and which, by its singular mixture of thoughts and principles, showed the historical heredity connecting the power of Napoleon with that of Charlemagne, united to the sovereign power which disposed in the name of conquest of territories and states, were confused in the imagination of the emperor, and made him look upon ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... circumstances, to sustain hardships, to overcome difficulties, to defend themselves, to outstrip their fellows, in short, to harmonise function with environment, survive. These propagate their kind according to the law of heredity. Variations exist in the progeny, and the individuals whose variations best adapt them to their environment are the fittest to, ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... families, successive and simultaneous, cover a period of forty-three years, and yellow and black keeps turning up right along. Scientifically, the suppression of Mormonism is a loss to the student of heredity. Some of the children are dead. Get killed now and then, and die too—die from sickness. But you'll easily notice Meakums as you go up the valley. Old man sees all get good jobs as soon as they're old enough. Places 'em on the railroad, places 'em in town, all over the ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... of mathematical reasoning, John. Your method is well enough for the building of a fortress or calculating the range of a gun. But it won't do for the actions of men. You allow nothing for feeling, sentiment, association, propinquity, heredity, ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... greatest prose writers of the eighteenth century, was born of English parents in Dublin in 1667. It is absolutely necessary to know something of his life in order to pass proper judgment on his writings. A cursory examination of his life will show that heredity and environment were responsible for many of his peculiarities. Swift's father died a few months before the birth of his son, and the boy saw ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... relating to the exclusion of the physically or mentally tainted are far too lax, and will bring their own punishment. The colonists, honestly anxious that their country shall in days to come show a fine and happy race, are strangely blind to the laws of heredity. They carelessly admit those whose children to the third and fourth generation must be a degrading influence. On the other hand, the Colony gains greatly by the regular and deliberate importation of English experts. Every year a small but important ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... it is an automatic life. The soul of the machine pervades us all, and the machines are beautiful. Our lives are logically and inevitably directed by environment and heredity just as the machines are inevitably directed by their functions and capabilities. When a child is born, we know already what he will do throughout his life, how long he will live, what sort of children he will ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... lying in the dewy grass under the apple-trees, giving way for almost the first time since his childhood to impulses which had hitherto, from his New England heredity, stiffened instead of relaxed his muscles of expression, felt as if he were being stung to death by ants. He was naturally a man of broad views, who felt the indignity of coping with such petty ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... seem to 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
... use to waste sense on her. Training—training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us. All that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 has been ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... mastered the sense and force of what he had said until minutes, more or less in each case, had flown past, and in the meantime he had talked on, and his talk had drifted to other points in the subject of heredity. Sophia answered him; ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... unceasing diligence. Mr. Ashby errs, we are certain, in taking the point of view of the unimaginative and unappreciative peasant. This sort of animal interprets Nature by physical, not mental associations, and is unfitted by heredity to receive impressions of the beautiful in its less material aspects. Whilst he grumbles at the crimson flames of Aurora, thinking only of the afternoon rain thus predicted, the man of finer mould, though equally cognizant that a downpour may follow, rejoices impulsively at the pure beauty ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... If anything, her opposition to the marriage was even more determined. In vain Pollyanna pleaded and argued. In vain she showed how deeply her happiness was concerned. Aunt Polly was obdurate. She would have none of the idea. She sternly admonished Pollyanna as to the possible evils of heredity, and warned her of the dangers of marrying into she knew not what sort of family. She even appealed at last to her sense of duty and gratitude toward herself, and reminded Pollyanna of the long years of loving care that had been hers in the home of her aunt, and she ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... only 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 ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... their moist lips are glued little clusters of Egyptian flies, which are considered here to be beneficial to the children, and the latter have no thought of driving them away, so resigned are they become, by force of heredity, to whatever annoyance they thereby suffer. Another example indeed of the passivity which their fathers show when brought face to face with the ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... of heredity must be occult and complex. The offspring of a rebellious and disobedient child, is certainly entitled to no filial instincts; and some day the strain will tell, and you will overwhelm your mother with ingratitude, black as that which she ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... 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
... 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 him, and not by him." ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford |
