xample, a family of artists,
starting with some sort of manual dexterity in imitating natural forms
and colours with paint and pencil, and strictly intermarrying always
with other families possessing exactly the same inherited endowments,
would probably go on getting more and more woodenly accurate in its
drawing; more and more conventionally correct in its grouping; more and
more technically perfect in its perspective and light-and-shade, and so
forth, by pure dint of accumulated hereditary experience from generation
to generation. It would pass from the Egyptian to the Chinese style of
art by slow degrees and with infinite gradations. But suppose, instead
of thus rigorously confining itself to its own caste, this family of
handicraft artists were to intermarry freely with poetical, or
seafaring, or candlestick-making stocks. What would be the consequence?
Why, such an infiltration of other hereditary characteristics, otherwise
acquired, as might make the young painters of future generations more
wide minded, more diversified, more individualistic, more vivid and
lifelike. Some divine spark of poetical imagination, some tenderness of
sentiment, some play of fancy, unknown perhaps, to the hard, dry,
matter-of-fact limners of the ancestral school, might thus be introduced
into the original line of hereditary artists. In this way one can easily
see how even intermarriage with non-artistic stocks might improve the
breed of a family of painters. For while each caste, left to itself, is
liable to harden down into a mere technical excellence after its own
kind, a wooden facility for drawing faces, or casting up columns of
figures, or hacking down enemies, or building steam-engines, a healthy
cross with other castes is liable to bring in all kinds of new and
valuable qualities, each of which, though acquired perhaps in a totally,
different line of life, is apt to bear a new application in the new
complex whereof it now forms a part.

In our very varied modern societies, every man and every woman, in the
upper and middle ranks of life at least, has an individuality and an
idiosyncrasy so compounded of endless varying stocks and races. Here is
one whose father was an Irishman and his mother a Scotchwoman; here is
another whose paternal line were country parsons, while his maternal
ancestors were city merchants or distinguished soldiers. Take almost
anybody's 'sixteen quarters'--his great-great grandfathers and
great-great grandm