deduction, but
rather a psychometric or prophetic faculty; for this reason neither
they nor their books have produced pupils worthy of the name. The main
features and lines only of the human form have a known meaning--and
not always a very precise one--for every physical, passional, mental,
or spiritual force possesses an organ of expression in the visible
body, and the varieties of form of this organ enable one to judge of
the degrees of force they express on the earth plane. On this basis,
peculiarities of form mainly stand; and the intensity of certain
defects or qualities is at times expressed so strongly that it
completely modifies the tendencies it would seem that heredity ought
to pass on. The similarity of form between parent and child is not
exact, because it proceeds from the peculiarities of the individual in
incarnation far more than from the collective tendencies of the
embryonic cells in process of proliferation.

The being charged with building the body can, in turn, considerably
modify its form, copying specially striking features found in the
mother's thought; certain characteristic family traits, the Bourbon
nose, for instance; those belonging to strangers in continual
relationship with the mother, and those that a babe, fed and brought
up away from home, takes from his nurse or from the surroundings amid
which he lives; all these probably leave their impress in the same
way. In this case, indeed, the "builder"--who, it must be added,
ceases the work of construction only when it is on its way to
completion, which happens about the age of seven--is influenced by the
forms of the new surroundings, and at times copies them, more or less,
and we may ask ourselves if the unexplained fact of negro children
being born to a white woman--the widow of a negro--remarried to a
white man is in no way connected with the reproduction of a mental
image of the coloured children of a former marriage.

Another fact: observers have noticed that almost all great men have
had as their mother a woman of lofty character. This preponderance of
the maternal influence will be understood if we remember that the
cellular mass that composes the child's body belongs to the mother,
not only because this mass originates from the proliferation of the
ovule, and, consequently, is only the multiplication of the maternal
substance, but also because the materials that have formed it and have
been transmuted into flesh have been supplied