THE LAW OF HEREDITY.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume V, Issue 1315, 14 August 1886, Page 3

THE LAW OF HEREDITY.

Heredity is one of the most absorbing and fruitful studies of the day. Statistics will bear ua out In saying that a largo proportion of those on whose course of life the world makes its strictures get their especial qualities by inheritance. Take a pedigree of licentiousness, such as that set forth in the remarkable little book, ‘ The Jnkesit would bo sheer folly to except anything but the grossest immorality of conduct from jow family. Lapses frt m sobriety in the highest circles of society will alwajs oc.ur, and those really the most painful cases. But they are the exceptions Nice tenths of those and upon whom the stigma of drunkard can bo placed come from the lowest, or at loast ihe lower, circles and from parents who transmit to them their proclivity for drink. We may even go further, and say that the i overly stricken, the ignorant, the deprived, are 1 tt.le If anything more than a direct transmission of primitive serfdom.

With slight circumstances this is true all over the world. This claes of people for ge: oration after generation have been bo-n, have grown up, and have died in the rams social status. Their condition of heart and mind has become not so much an intellectual and moral lasne as a physical issue. There is more truth in the old principle of royal blood than many Democratic communities would acknow ledge. The spirituality of a Channiug the logical clearness of a John Stnart Mill, the inventive genins of an Edison is just n mnch a matter of physical transmission as is the love of whisky, the penchant for lager beer, or the bent for ingenious Heredity is an established fret that no man can afford to ignore;' The altruistic Impulse to look out for the physical inheritance of posterity is one of the most Christian as it is one of the most scientific. There is nothing doubtful about its principles. They are matters of stern, harsh reality. The intimate connection between mlod and body makes it a difficult thing to tell at what point or In how Urge a degree 'ho wrong thought, word, and deed, or the beneficent thought, word, and deed enter into the physical constitution and btc mes a matter of physical transmission. But enter they certainly do, and that, too, in a marked degree. This thought is all too frequently forgotten. There is no theology, no depth of ph ; loaopy about it. 35nt in the facts of heredity and

tiansmitted influence there la a world of pain and pathos, or joy and beneficence. If the selfish, niggardly unwholesome parents scattered over Christendom were to realise deeply that by generation and transmitted influence they wore peopling the world with selfish, niggardly, unwholesome children, who in turn beget after their kind, perhaps the higher morality at which Church and State both aim would receive a greater impetus than either Church or State can give it,—Cor. Chicago Times.