others, of whom he has sixteen all told--and what do
you often find? A peer, a cobbler, a barrister, a common sailor, a Welsh
doctor, a Dutch merchant, a Huguenot pastor, a cornet of horse, an Irish
heiress, a farmer's daughter, a housemaid, an actress, a Devonshire
beauty, a rich young lady of sugar-broking extraction, a Lady Carolina,
a London lodging-house keeper. This is not by any means an exaggerated
case; it would be easy, indeed, from one's own knowledge of family
histories to supply a great many real examples far more startling than
this partially imaginary one. With such a variety of racial and
professional antecedents behind us, what infinite possibilities are
opened before us of children with ability, folly, stupidity, genius?

Infinite numbers of intermixtures everywhere exist in civilised
societies. Most of them are passable; many of them are execrable; a few
of them are admirable; and here and there, one of them consists of that
happy blending of individual characteristics which we all immediately
recognise as genius--at least after somebody else has told us so.

The ultimate recipe for genius, then, would appear to be somewhat after
this fashion. Take a number of good, strong, powerful stocks, mentally
or physically, endowed with something more than the average amount of
energy and application. Let them be as varied as possible in
characteristics; and, so far as convenient, try to include among them a
considerable small-change of races, dispositions, professions, and
temperaments. Mix, by marriage, to the proper consistency; educate the
offspring, especially by circumstances and environment, as broadly,
freely, and diversely as you can; let them all intermarry again with
other similarly produced, but personally unlike, idiosyncrasies; and
watch the result to find your genius in the fourth or fifth generation.
If the experiment has been properly performed, and all the conditions
have been decently favourable, you will get among the resultant five
hundred persons a considerable sprinkling of average fools, a fair
proportion of modest mediocrities, a small number of able people, and
(in case you are exceptionally lucky and have shuffled your cards very
carefully) perhaps among them all a single genius. But most probably the
genius will have died young of scarlet fever, or missed fire through
some tiny defect of internal brain structure. Nature herself is trying
this experiment unaided every day all around u