"Heredity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 odds. "For God's sake, if I had to be done to death, why couldn't it have been for ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the grandson of old John, a pioneer who was in his day a saw-log baron of the times of pumpkin pine; by heredity Ward was the foremost champion in the cause of ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... is an article here on heredity that you must read. It has some reference to what we began to ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... sort of Poole or Dartmouth, existing solely for purposes of marine merchandise, and depending for prosperity, and life itself, on the sea. Much of a wire-drawn ingenuity has been conjectured about the probable strains of heredity which met in Ibsen. It is not necessary to do more than to recognize the slight but obstinate exoticism, which kept all his forbears more or less foreigners still in their Norwegian home; and to insist on the mixture of ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... a strange, embarrassed and intolerable feeling comes over me when he stands before me and I reflect that he came from myself, that he belongs to me through the intimate bond that links father and son, that, thanks to the terrible law of heredity, he is my own self in a thousand ways, in his blood and his flesh, and that he has even the same germs of disease, the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... reproduction of the race is small in comparison with the role of the female. He is merely a supernumerary who steps on the stage for a moment and speaks one word announcing the arrival of the queen. The queen is the mother. She plays the star role in the drama of Heredity. She is never off the stage for a single moment. We inherit the most obvious physical traits from our male ancestors but even these may be modified by ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... an essential condition of bad breeding also; and bad breeding is indispensable to the weeding out of the human race. When the conception of heredity took hold of the scientific imagination in the middle of last century, its devotees announced that it was a crime to marry the lunatic to the lunatic or the consumptive to the consumptive. But pray are we to try ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... truer if she had won him, but as it is I am richly content with it. Perhaps I am the more content because in the case of Kitty Morrow I find a concession to reality more entire than the case of Mrs. Hunter. She is of the heredity from which you would expect her depravity; but Kitty Morrow, who lets herself go so recklessly, is, for all one knows, as well born and as well bred as those other Philadelphians. In my admiration of her, as a work of art, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... The law of 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 ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... "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 ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... more and more as though the past week had been a grisly burden that was slipping off him like a bad dream, acquiesced in a rush of eager thankfulness. The complications of life were beginning to unfold in front of him, and both by training and heredity he turned to the things that bore relation elsewhere but in ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... when I frankly acknowledge to myself that she can make the light of the world for me, there are black moments when I distrust her—distrust my impressions of her; and hate myself for doing both. I used to believe so firmly in heredity that I can't throw aside my old theories in a moment, even for her sake. How comes Ellaline de Nesville's and Fred Lethbridge's daughter to be what this girl seems? That's what I ask myself; but there again your letter helps. You remind me that "our parents are ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... member of 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] ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... "Acquired characteristics could be handed down by heredity. It took the Academy of Agricultural Science at least a decade to dispose of him. Why? Because his theories fitted into Stalin's political beliefs." ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... 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 an Andover ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... seems 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 ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... dropping all forms of conventional prefix. When an individual has revolutionized therapeutics by his discovery of the continuous evolution of brain matter, conventional forms are unfitting, since they would seem to limit him to one of a class. You, gentlemen, who by nationality, by heredity, or by the possession of natural gifts, are fitted to hold your respective places in the moving world, I take to witness that I am as sane as at least the majority of men who are in full possession of their liberties. And I am sure that you, Dr. Seward, ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... I thought he must want to get something out o' me, he go so flattering—for a minute! 'Bibbs couldn't help havin' business brains,' he says, 'bein' YOUR son. Don't be surprised,' he says—'don't be surprised at his makin' a success,' he says. 'He couldn't get over his heredity; he couldn't HELP bein' a business success—once you got him into it. It's in his blood. Yes, sir' he says, 'it doesn't need MUCH brains,' he says, 'an only third-rate brains, at that,' he says, 'but it does need a special KIND o' brains,' he says, 'to be a millionaire. ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... phenomenon of natural history, sanctified by inevitability; that the causes of it are world-wide, elemental; and that we ought to hang up a lamp before Laevsky, since he is the fated victim of the age, of influences, of heredity, and so on. All the officials and their ladies were in ecstasies when they listened to him, and I could not make out for a long time what sort of man I had to deal with, a cynic or a clever rogue. Such types as he, on the surface intellectual ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... like a wild thing! Sails a boat like an old tar! Swims like a fish! Motherless—old Billy, a poor shote, according to the gossip! The women have a sort of pitying contempt for him; the men keep their mouths shut, but you can fancy the training of this girl. I'm always interested in heredity and I'd like to know the girl's mother. Something ought to account for ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... 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 thought attributed ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... says in his Introduction, he insists upon two main points: (1) the substantial identity between heredity and memory, and (2) the reintroduction of design into organic development; and these two points he treats as though they have something of that physical life with which they are so closely associated. He was aware that what he had to say ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... 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 ...
— All He Knew - A Story • John Habberton
... Charles Halle's Concerts, and at Bristol, Chester, Leeds, Birmingham, and other leading towns. As seems to have been the case with most well-dowered musicians, Madame Cole's talent owes something to heredity. Musical ability, greater or less, may at all events be traced back in her family for a considerable period. Madame Cole's first distinct success in public was gained with Mr. Theodore Thomas, during that gentleman's first "grand transcontinental tour from ocean ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... was said. Scaife's manner rather than his matter confounded the younger and less experienced boy. Scaife, too, tackled problems which many men prefer to leave alone. Here heredity cropped up. Scaife's sire and grandsire were earning their bread before they were sixteen. Of necessity they faced and overcame obstacles which the ordinary Public School-boy never meets till ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... place for his holiday, and return home dissatisfied. He has chosen unwisely. He has associated with that which is beneath him. Man's scenic environment and its influence over him are as much a matter of scientific knowledge, as the influence of his heredity or his food. A wise man, therefore, puts himself, at vacation time, in relationship with that scenic environment which will best minister to his welfare. Nature is God's provision for supplying man with his ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... 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
... not thus; Time mocks at pause, In march continual onward goes; Th' unfailing progress of his laws, No respite nor effacement knows; This year is but the force of last, Not something new to mortal ken; Heredity's enchainment vast Enthrals the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... arose in Western Asia within a restricted area, and from nations whose Semitic origin is unmistakable. The subject of ethnic affinities and differences, of the transmission of qualities and characteristics, is exceedingly obscure; but, if the theory of heredity be allowed any weight at all, there should be no difficulty in accepting the view that particular races of mankind have ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... the absence of light[1]; or we are assured that "what we call 'evil' is only incidental to the progress and development of the [universal] order" [2]—a necessary step in evolution. Now again the burden of responsibility is shifted from the shoulders of the individual on to heredity and environment; or compromise with what is known to be moral evil is not only excused as a necessity, but commended as a duty; or the average person's feelings are considerately soothed by {142} the pronouncement that "the mass of a Christian ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... enigmatic smile gave place to a look of regret and uneasiness. "Let us hope, however, not too much. Heredity," he mused in sombre mood, "is a force of such fatality ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... myoclonic affection of the hind leg which is discussed in works on theory and practice under the head of neuroses, but the cause or causes have not been established. Theories that heredity is responsible have their supporters and advocates of hypotheses attributing it to disease of the sciatic nerve, patellar subluxation, fascial contraction of various muscles, "dry spavin" (tarsal arthritis), ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... 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 it ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... 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
... reason for expecting such a development. Philosophically and morally, the raison d'etre of the doctrine of reincarnation is to explain the inequalities of life; and it does it not, as Jesus would do it, by means of the doctrine of heredity, but by the retributive power of Karma, or actions pursuing the soul through successive births and compelling it to reveal by its conditions and reflect by its experiences in each birth the experiences of the previous birth. The moral influence of such a doctrine is rendered all but impossible ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... not inconsistent with a high degree of bodily vigor and long periods of apparently complete mental saneness. Now, if I were not speaking to one who has shared her father's studies in bee-life, I would not introduce the subject of heredity. But you know, Miss Martin, that such racial characteristics are transmitted, or transmissible, I should say, by sex opposites. Thus, an epileptic mother is more likely to give her taint to a son than to a daughter.... Yes, I mean all that, and more," he went on, seeing the look ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... and I never saw her again. She died many years ago, poor soul, and I suppose is now freezing her former acquaintances in the Shades, for I cannot imagine that she ever had a friend. They talk a great deal about the influences of heredity nowadays, but I don't believe very much in them myself. Who, for instance, could conceive that persons so utterly different in every way as Lady Longden and her daughter, Miss Holmes, could be mother and child? Our bodies, no doubt, we do inherit from our ancestors, ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... sought mine and he winked at me solemnly as I unostentatiously transferred the hat I was carrying to my right hand. Long training has largely counterbalanced heredity in my case, but I still pitch ball, play tennis and carve with my left hand. But Hotchkiss was too busy with ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... lives usually are burdensome and full of misery. They may be deformed or be continually afflicted with ulcers or other horrible manifestations of the disease. I will explain this more thoroughly when I speak of heredity. ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... requires what she could not give him—namely, logic. Had she been clever enough to reason logically she might have undermined the little fellow's innate honesty of character, despite the fact that he lacked a child's chief incentive to learn from its mother, namely, the sympathy of heredity. ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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, ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the same circumstances—and why; and if we watch the professional psychologist, we often find him working at just this problem. He tests a great number of individuals to see how they differ, and tries to discover on what factors their differences depend, how far on heredity, how far on environment. The "psychologist" in such a place as the children's court {3} is a specialist whose duty it is to test the delinquent children that are brought before the court, with the special object of measuring ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... of her son? With much strong feeling, yet with much simplicity, she spoke to Fred of this great task, which sometimes frightened her; he gave her his advice, and both discussed together the things that make up a good man. Giselle brought up frequently the subject of heredity: she named no one, but Fred could see that she had a secret terror lest Enguerrand, who in person was very like his father, might also inherit his character. Fears on this subject, however, appeared unfounded. There was nothing about the child ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... ability waits idly 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 ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... 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 ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... 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 ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... 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
... 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, ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... particularly where they are reared in cities, are exceedingly prone to nervousness in one form or another. The condition is undoubtedly often due to heredity, but may be induced in otherwise healthy children by unhygienic surroundings and improper food. Infants exhibiting symptoms that indicate trouble of this kind should not be played with, and every care should be exercised to so direct their lives that the trouble may be gradually overcome. In ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... is as good as another; Christianity, he finds, is the virtual sanctification by supernatural authority of democracy. He points out the incompatibility of political democracy, for example, with the determinism to which Mr. Blatchford's logical atheism has brought him. If man is the creature of his heredity and his environment, as Mr. Blatchford asserts, and if a slum-bred heredity and a slum environment do not make for high intelligence, then obviously it is against the best interests of the State to allow the slum inhabitant to vote. On the other hand, it is ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... solution to an issue that seemed unfathomable. Was he ugly? No. Was he repulsive? No. Was he a woman hater? No. Was he a criminal? No. Had he offended the fair sex in any way? No. Was he poor? No. Did he belong to the human family? Yes. With what disease then was he afflicted? Was it heredity? Could he cast the blame upon his ancestors? Up and down the Thompson valley he searched and searched but he could find no answer—even the echo would not speak. Other fellows seemed to have no difficulty in getting themselves tangled up in the meshes of real beautiful love ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... and a cry to the heart of man that broods over it in vain, yet cannot choose but hear. In this region the near affinity of realism to pessimism, to atheism, is plain enough; its necessary dealing with the base, the brutal, the unredeemed, the hopeless darkness of the infamies of heredity, criminal education, and successful malignity, eating into the being as well as controlling the fortune of their victims, is manifest; and what answer has ever been found to the interrogation they make? It is not merely that particular facts are here irreconcilable; but laws themselves are ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... snarled, less than a yard from Finn's ears, and her snarl was the snarl which announces a kill. It was not for others to kill where Finn led. And yet something—he could not tell what, since he knew nothing of heredity—something held the great Wolfhound's muscles relaxed; he could not take the leap which was wont to precede killing with him. Again Warrigal snarled. The man was rising to his feet. A great fear of being shamed was upon Finn. With that snarl in his ears advance was a necessity. He moved forward quickly, ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... the boy, as if to himself. "Poor Hayes. He may be quite a wonderful man, considering all things, his heredity and his environment. What would I have been, ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... Kemper, with his 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 matter ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... 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 preacher of his day in Scotland. No doubt Rutherford raged furiously ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... law of heredity is not trustworthy in the transmission of greatness, Kenkenes was the product of three generations of heroic genius. He might have developed the frequent example of decadence; he might have sustained ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... chilly streams, breaking through the ice when 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 ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 9, September, 1889 • Various
... 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 ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... modern in its spirit, too removed from the currents of popular belief, to find ready acceptance on the part of those who are largely influenced by traditional beliefs. The religion of the great majority of persons is determined by tradition or social heredity, by what they are taught in childhood or hear commonly repeated around them. Only persons who are naturally independent and self-reliant can overcome the difficulties in the way of embracing a form of religion which carries them outside of the established ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... been awake eight minutes when his brain was invaded by plans—plans of debauchery, palaces, orgy, flying beds of ivory arabesqued in fan-traceries of sapphire, in which Rebekah Frankl lolled, and smiled; and on toward Thring he stepped, prince new- crowned, yet by old heredity, high exalted above laws, government, and the ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... body—is limited. There is climate, involving heat and cold and moisture, the seasons of the year, etc.; there is organic growth, involving birth, growth, reproduction, and decay; there is race, involving the limitations of heredity; there is the telluric life of the planet and the circulation of the forces of the solar system, whence arise the processes of sleeping, waking, dreaming, and kindred phenomena; there is the emotional ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... is largely due to education in the home, the church, and the school; but it is also the result of heredity. Races seem to differ naturally in regard to these things. The Germans have always been cruel, hard, and unmerciful, while the French are tender and inclined to be too easy, even with wrongdoers. The ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... diverged from its sister science, morphology, that it completely and entirely ignores two of the most important functions of evolution, heredity and adaptation. This has been clearly shown by Haeckel, who has done much towards bringing about a change of opinion ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... the blood. I dare say if I had the good fortune to have any religious convictions, I should dogmatize over them in the pulpit, and pound the cushions as vigorously as any itinerant evangelist. Well, well! heredity is a queer thing. We think we get away from it, but it is always cropping up in unexpected places. Our ancestors are like atra cura, and ride behind every ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... work published since Darwin's own books which has so thoroughly handled the matter treated by him, or has done so much to place in order and clearness the immense complexity of the factors of heredity, or, lastly, has brought to light so many new facts and considerations bearing on ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... am well aware that in much that follows (though in nothing that precedes) I seem to be crossing the heavily shotted bows of Mr. Galton, for whose laborious investigations into the heredity of genius I have the greatest respect. Mr. Galton inclines to think that genius of intellect and passion is bound to express itself, whatever the outward opportunity, and that within any given race ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... kings of France, of 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 ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... strong as to-day, and never were our executive officers so weak. Our cities frequently are ridden with criminals or rioters. We set hundreds of policemen to restore order, but order is not restored. What is the average policeman as a criminal-taker? Cloddy and coarse of fiber, rarely with personal heredity of mental or bodily vigor, with no training at arms, with no sharp, incisive quality of nerve action, fat, unwieldy, unable to run a hundred yards and keep his breath, not skilled enough to kill his man even when he has him cornered, ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... No less remarkable than the persistency of the mores is their changeableness and variation. There is here an interesting parallel to heredity and variation in the organic world, even though the parallel has no significance. Variation in the mores is due to the fact that children do not perpetuate the mores just as they received them. The father dies, and the son whom he has educated, even if he continues the ritual and repeats ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... because of a long evolution in action—not in pure thought. We have got our sight by looking for prey or for enemies, and our hearing by listening for the movement of prey or of enemies. Our reason, too, is fashioned out of a long heredity of action, that is to say an immemorial discipline in an existence purely animal. So powerful is the influence of this heredity, so real seems to us a physical world which is not real, so infallible seem to ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... came when I put Peter into the pocket of my overcoat, and took him away to his new home. I had the greatest confidence in him, being a firm believer in the doctrine of heredity. His father I never knew, but his grandfather bore a great reputation for courage, as was indicated on his tombstone, the inscription on which ran ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... the man who has succeeded along the line in which we hope to succeed, whose success is measured as we hope to measure our own. Each leader of science and of intellectual life is in some degree the disciple of one who has planned and led before him. There is a heredity of intellect, a heredity of action, as subtle and as real as the heredity of the continuous germ-plasm. Ask the teacher who has helped mould your life, who in turn was his own master. In a very few generations you trace back ...
— Life's Enthusiasms • David Starr Jordan
... you notice it? (with pride). It was almost incredible the amount I contrived to put away. But I shall suffer for it to-morrow (gloomily). Heredity again! I wish ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 18, 1891 • Various
... subtler significance of these circumstances; born and bred, as 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
... heart that Bel had come through direct heredity on the maternal side by this "carryin' herself positive," he knew better than to say so, and his only reply was a good-natured laugh, with: "You'll see! I'm not afraid. She's a good child, ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... which governs them. That law, in the present instance, is the permanence of race. Contradictory as may appear this result, the more one studies the cosmopolites, the more one ascertains that the most irreducible idea within them is that special strength of heredity which slumbers beneath the monotonous uniform of superficial relations, ready to reawaken as soon as love stirs the depths of the temperament. But there again a difficulty, almost insurmountable, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... accession of the Younger Branch was the triumph of the Revolution. To him the victory of the tricolor meant the resurrection of Montagne, which this time should surely bring the nobility down to the dust by means more certain than that of the guillotine, because less violent. The peerage without heredity; the National Guard, which puts on the same camp-bed the corner grocer and the marquis; the abolition of the entails demanded by a bourgeois lawyer; the Catholic Church deprived of its supremacy; and all the other legislative inventions of August, 1830,—were ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... agreed on the paucity of unit-characters that circulate in the heredity of the lesser races as compared with the immense variety of unit-characters in say the French, or German, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... the wards and private rooms where the maimed and the crippled and the incurable are faintly struggling in the grasp of death. I would like to lead them through the children's ward, where mites of humanity cursed with heredity's blight, removed from a mother's bosom, consigned to suffering throughout the span of their feeble days, lie faintly breathing their lives away. And then would like to say to them: "You contemptible cowards, you abominable fussers, ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... his truthfulness on the one point, nor did they now doubt it on this other; but no one 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 ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... at work in the youth which, together, saved him from the follies about him: first, and greater, the nobleness of character which was his by heredity; and, second, the high ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... one generation to ripen the fruits of "Old Ed" Austin's lawlessness, and upon his son heredity had played one of her grimmest pranks. The father had had faults, but they were those of his virtues; he had been a strong man, at least, and had "ridden herd" upon his unruly passions with the same thoroughness ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... the distinction of races rests upon hereditary variations, but heredity itself cannot become active till the characteristic or Zustand is produced which is to be handed down.[35] But environment determines what variation shall become stable enough to be passed on by heredity. For instance, we can hardly ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... it was soon found that the new member was not only a man of rare ability, but was also in nearly all respects very unlike his illustrious father. Never was there a more striking instance of that strange freak of heredity by which an able son is sometimes much less the continuation than the complement of an able father, exhibiting in strongly contrasted lights both opposite qualities and opposite defects. The fourteenth Earl was a great orator. He was one of the greatest debaters who have ever lived. He was a party ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... 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
... States. We began during the Anniversary week in Boston, and had several crowded, enthusiastic meetings in Tremont Temple. In addition to our suffrage meetings, I spoke before the Free Religious, Moral Education, and Heredity associations. All our speakers stayed at the Parker House, and we had a very pleasant time visiting together in our leisure hours. We were received by Governor Long, at the State House. He made a short speech, in favor of woman suffrage, in reply to Mrs. Hooker. We also called on the Mayor, at the ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... and twenty, was a very dark young woman, short of stature and somewhat deformed, with her left shoulder higher than the right. There seemed to be nothing of her father or mother in her. Her case was one of those unforeseen accidents in family heredity which make people wonder whence they can arise. Her only pride lay in her beautiful black eyes and superb black hair, which, short as she was, would, said she, have sufficed to clothe her. But her nose was long, her face deviated to the left, and her chin was pointed. Her thin, witty, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Certainly venality 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... greatest genius are all its talents self-derived. Countless influences mould our intellect and mould our heart. One of these, and often one of the most potent, is heredity. Consciously or unconsciously, for good or for evil, physically and mentally, the father and mother are in the child, as indeed all his ancestors ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... to the life and letters of the Jukes family. Margaret, the mother of criminals, six generations ago, founded a prolific line, and her progeny, mostly in jail, now numbers some twelve hundred. Moral: watch the children with a bad heredity so carefully that none of them can ever have any excuse for growing ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... with the gods, and who can repeat those whispers to mortals, it is a waste of divine energy—a sacrilege. For genius is not handed down. It is given to one alone. It is not hereditary. For genius accumulated through heredity would at last produce a god. And that the jealous gods will not allow. Therefore the child of a genius is rarely a genius itself. It is born with a veil across its eyes that it may not see divinity and so return ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... 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 fiend or goblin; the ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... masterly organisms which we call plants and animals: in the beginning, the simplest forms, and next a slow, gradual, complex and perfected organization; the organ created through habits, necessity and surrounding medium; heredity transmitting acquired modifications,[3105] all denoting in advance, in a state of conjecture and approximation, the cellular theory of later physiologists[3106] and the conclusions of Darwin. In the picture which the human mind draws of nature, the general outline is ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of it, the more he regretted his haste in consenting to incur 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 individualities of ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... and morality 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
... and smiled. "I don't think your notions of heredity are sound, Quinny. Is that all you ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... the 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 thereto. Then as a clergyman, ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... 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 ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... conditions, of course, burdens to be imposed. He must, for instance, take my name. You cannot expect everything without some return. And I must go into all the circumstances of his life before I can accept him. He must be sound. I must know his heredity, how his parents and grandparents died, have the strictest inquiries made into ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... could not have helped it—she could not have stayed the words, though a suspended sword were to fall with the saying. It was the cry of tradition and religion, and every home-bred, convent- nurtured habit, the instinct of heredity, the wail of woman, for whom destiny, or man, or nature, has arranged the disproportionate share of life's penalties. It was the impotent rebellion against the first curse, that man in his punishment should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow—which he might do with joy—while the woman ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... as to have been unable, at twenty years of 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 fool, man or blackleg. He runs in all shapes, and in all degrees of definiteness. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... of men, that they are fair; and they take them wives of all that they choose. And so a mixed race springs up and increases, without detriment at first to the commonwealth. For, by a well-known law of heredity, the cross between two races, probably far apart, produces at first a progeny possessing the forces, and, alas! probably the vices of both. And when the sons of God go in to the daughters of men, there are giants in the ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, etc.,' to a generation that was more and more disposed to say something like this: 'We hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists; that all things looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by heredity and environment with no equal rights, but very unequal wrongs,' and so on. I do not believe that creed, left to itself, would ever have founded a state; and I am pretty certain that, left to itself, it would never have overthrown ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... their parents in ability is that the highest order of mind results from a fortunate mixture of incongruous constituents, and not of such as naturally harmonize. Those constituents are negatively correlated, and therefore the compound is unstable in heredity. This is eminently the case in the typical artistic temperament, which certainly harmonizes with Bohemianism and passion, and is opposed to the useful qualities of regularity, foresight, and level common sense. Where these and certain other incongruous faculties ...
— Noteworthy Families (Modern Science) • Francis Galton and Edgar Schuster
... in writing this volume was to discuss the relations of modern discoveries concerning hormones or internal secretions to the question of the evolution of adaptations, and on the other hand to the results of recent investigations of Mendelian heredity and mutations. I have frequently found, from verbal or written references to my opinions, that the evidence on these questions and my own conclusions from that evidence were either imperfectly known or misunderstood. This is not surprising in view of the fact that hitherto my only publications on ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... comprehending any material reason why. He may confess, although there is but a trifle more sunshine than a month ago—and what influence a trifle where there is so much—and scarcely any difference of temperature, that Nature is insisting on obedience to one of her mighty laws—the law of heredity. Why, therefore, refrain from justifying the allusion? Why persist in declining the invitations of the hour? Far be it from me to do so. Is sufferance the cognizance ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... attempt is made to put a new valuation on the traditional evidence for evolution. In the second lecture the most recent work on heredity is dealt with, for only characters that are inherited can become a part of the evolutionary process. In the third lecture the physical basis of heredity and the composition of the germ plasm stream are examined in ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... Nothing tells us that the 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 ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... was unkindly. Like Biddy and Terrence, he was fierce and unafraid; which attributes were wrapped up in his heredity. And, like Biddy and Terrence, he delighted in nigger-chasing, which, in turn, was a matter of training. From his earliest puppyhood he had been so trained. Niggers were niggers, but white men were gods, and ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... this period of life which the moralist and educator justly contend should be carefully guarded. It is really a concession to environment, and a tacit argument against radical heredity as the foundation upon which rest the character and disposition of the adult, and which is the mainspring of his future moral conduct. It is impossible to philosophize ourselves ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... with 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 plume and ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... which came of the soil rather than of the city pavement. But it was a robustness in a finer than the wonted sense, a vigorous daintiness, it might be called, which gave an impression of virility with none of the womanly left out. It told of a heredity of seekers and fighters, of people that worked stoutly with head and hand, of ghosts that reached down out of the misty past and moulded and made her to be a doer ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... belonged to the woman. Thus, as defined by institutions, the stock was just above savagery and just within the lower stages of barbarism. Accordingly the governmental functions were hereditary in the male line, yet the law of heredity was subject to modification or suspension at the will of the group, commonly at the instance of rebels or usurpers of marked prowess or shrewdness. The property regulations were definite and strictly observed; as among other barbarous peoples, the land was common ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... society," though by no means composed of the richest citizens. In Boston, though the Almighty Dollar now plays a much more important role than before, it is still a combination of culture and ancestry that sets the most highly prized hall-mark on the social items. And indeed the heredity of such families as the Quincys, the Lowells, the Winthrops, and the Adamses, which have maintained their superior position for generations, through sheer force of ability and character, without the external buttresses ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... and tea; meat, pudding, vegetables, and bread, for 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 two Major-Generals, ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... culture, elegance and power added such luster to Virginia in the 18th century, were the descendants of cavalier or aristocratic settlers. It was so easy to account for the noble nature of a Randolph, a Lee or a Mason by nobleness of descent, that careful investigation was considered unnecessary, and heredity was accepted as a sufficient explanation of the existence and ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... disappeared over the fence which separated the plot of ground from the 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 up to ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... to be suppressed. For instance, on the Fourth Level Europo-American Sector, where I was just working, there is a political sect, the Communists, who, in the territory under their control, forbid the teaching of certain well-established facts of genetics and heredity, because those facts do not fit the world-picture demanded by their political doctrines. And on the same sector, a religious sect recently tried, in some sections successfully, to outlaw the teaching of evolution ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... Lent Jack was told to go into training. We had a mild celebration on the evening of Shrove Tuesday, and Bunny Langham, who had been President of the Union and had developed a habit of making very long speeches, for which he apologized by saying that he believed in heredity, came round and helped to make a noise. Whenever he got the ghost of an opportunity he began to congratulate Jack, and he required a very ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... essential motive, of evolution. For what is, in effect, the hidden force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to perpetuate themselves and to fight for their persistence and propagation? Selection, adaptation, heredity, these are only external conditions. This inner, essential force has been called will on the supposition that there exists also in other beings that which we feel in ourselves as a feeling of will, the impulse to be everything, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... indeed, but that which all the world is seeking—knowledge of Him whom to know aright is the fulfillment of every human need: the kinship of the soul with God; the life of purity, honor, and piety demanded by that high heredity; the unity and fellowship of the race in duty and destiny; and the faith that the soul is deathless as God its Father is deathless! Now to accept this faith as a mere philosophy is one thing, but to realize it as an experience of the innermost heart is another ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... natural boy by a mother who had been a "perfect little lady" in her girlhood and who was moulding her son in the forms that fashioned her. If it were the purpose of this tale to deal in philosophy, it would be easy to digress and show that Mealy Jones was a study in heredity; that from his mother's side of the house he inherited wide, white, starched collars, and from his father's side, a burning desire to spit through his teeth. But this is only a simple tale, with no great ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... passionate nature one 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 ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... that Heredity and Environment are the prime influences under which the whole Organic World is sustained; in other words, every organism has implanted in it by heredity the principle of life, but the conditions under which ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... beginning of pure and perfect life into the midst of humanity. All the rest of mankind, knit together by that mysterious bond of natural descent which only now for the first time is beginning to receive its due attention on the part of men of science, by heredity have the taint upon them. And if Jesus Christ is only one of the series, then there is no deliverance in Him, for there is no sinlessness in that life. However fair its record may seem on the surface, there is beneath, somewhere or other, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... Carlyle (Hero-worship), Nietzsche, et al., the great man is an autonomous product, a being without a peer, a demigod, "Uebermensch." He can be explained neither by heredity, nor ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... more its investigation would repay us. But it must be self-investigation; what we want are facts of mind, mental data and in order to get them, we must investigate the living mind All the usual explanations of Temperament, Nature, Heredity, Education are the same difficulties, expressed in different words. Heredity is a circumstance, which has to be reckoned with, but we have to investigate, not circumstances, but results. Here is a living complex ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... sub-consciousness which is called tradition, which some have called a dead thing, but which is really a thing far more living than the intellect. There is a dark kinship and brotherhood of all mankind which is much too deep to be called heredity or to be in any way explained in scientific formulae; blood is thicker than water and is especially very much thicker than water on the brain. But this unconscious and even automatic quality in Dickens's defence of the Christmas feast, this fact that his defence might almost be called animal ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... Jean Francois Millet, several landscapes and pastorals of Rops recall the French painter's style. In his Belgian out-of-doors scenes and interiors the Belgian heredity of Rops projects itself unmistakably. Such a picture as Scandal, for example, might have been signed by Israels. Le Bout de Sillon is Millet, and beautifully drawn. The scheme is trite. Two peasants, a young woman and a young man holding a rope, exchange love vows. It is very ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... where 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
... religion, the daughters were Protestants from their childhood. His father left the Roman Catholic communion early in life, without adopting any other form of Christian faith. It is not surprising that out of so strongly marked and widely mingled a heredity there should have emerged a writer prone to symbolism and open to the sense of beauty in ritual, and yet too cosmopolitan to accept easily the conventional religious forms. Before his twentieth year he had come under the influence of Ruskin's writings, but ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... so simple and an employment so humble be in itself an epoch in one's life—an entrance into a new world? To answer this question some account of my early life is necessary. The interest now taken in questions of heredity and in the study of the growing mind of the child may excuse a word about my ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... have been expected, this premature death of Nobunaga—for he was only forty-nine years old—created an intense excitement. The idea of heredity had so fixed a place in men's minds, that the only thought of Nobunaga's friends and retainers was to put forward in his place some one who should be his heir. There were living two sons, both by concubines, viz. Nobuo and Nobutaka, and a grandson, Samboshi, still a child, who was a son ...
— Japan • David Murray
... 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 ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... an innocent act on his part. He went out first, and of course had the choice of hats. As a rule I try to get out first myself. But I hold that it was an innocent, unconscious act, due, perhaps, to heredity. He was thinking about ecclesiastical matters, and when a man is in that condition of mind he will take anybody's hat. The result was that the whole afternoon I was under the influence of his clerical hat and could not tell a lie. Of course, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... wherever she was put, content to amuse herself with her ten fingers, or the new accomplishment of blowing bubbles out of her mouth. In all characteristics she was so different from what her own two strenuous, exacting babies had been that Kate marveled anew at the power of heredity. ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... 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, ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... to ponder over the problem, wondering what Professor Fortescue would say to it. There appeared to be more here than mere heredity could account for. But science had never solved this problem; originality seemed always to enter upon its career, uncaused and unaccountable. It was ever a miraculous phenomenon. The Professor had always said so. Still the heritage ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird |
