ther persons
performing gymnastic feats. These they learn in weeks, where others,
without such ancestral memories, would require months or years.

Evidently this may be applied much more widely than to mere physical
skill. Few of us can boast of gymnastic ancestry, but all of us have
inherited predispositions and have ancestral memories that make it easier
for us to learn certain things and to choose certain courses than we
should find it without them. Some of these are good; some bad. Some are
useful; some injurious. It is necessary only to awaken them to set going a
train of consequences; if not awakened, they may remain permanently
dormant. How important, therefore, are the suggestions that may serve as
such awakeners; how necessary to bring forward the useful, and to banish
the injurious ones!

Now of all possible agencies that may bring these predispositions into
play--that may awaken our ancestral memories, if you choose to adopt this
theory--I submit that the book stands at the very head. For it is itself a
racial record; it may contain, in the form best suited to awaken our
predispositions, the very material which, long ages ago, was instrumental
in handing those predispositions down to us. It is in tune with our latent
memories, and it may set them vibrating more vigorously than any merely
contemporary agency.

Does this not place in a new and interesting light the library and the
books of which it is composed? We have learned to respect them as the
records of the race and to recognize their value as teachers and their
power as energizers; in addition we now see that they may act as fingers
on invisible mental triggers. A slight impulse--altogether trivial
compared with its effect--and off goes the gun. The discharge may carry a
line to a wrecked ship, or it may sink her with all on board.

We frequently hear it said of some book whose tendency is bad: "Well, it
can't hurt me, anyway; I'm immune." Are you quite sure? Have you gone
quite to the bottom of those ancestral memories of yours, and are you
certain that there are none that such a book may rouse, to your harm?

On the other hand, does this not explain much that has always interested
the librarian; for instance, the vast popularity of fairy tales,
especially those that date back to our racial infancy? I need dwell no
further on the economic importance of the book as viewed from this
standpoint.

But it has also a function almost diametrically oppos