men."

Other wills are being made daily that through sober, virtuous,
youthful lives will bequeath to posterity dowers of health, strength,
purity and power.

This being true, it seems only a part of prudent foresight to study in
youth the law that governs the transmission of personal
characteristics to the future "denizens of life's great city." This
law is known as Heredity, and its first written record is in the first
chapter of Genesis, where it is written that "Every plant and animal
shall bring forth after its kind." We are so accustomed to seeing the
results of this law that we give it little or no thought. We see that
grass springs up each year on our lawns and meadows. We know that if
we put the seeds of a certain flower in the ground, that kind of
flower will always spring up, never another kind. The farmer is not
anxious, after he sows wheat, for fear that the crop will be rye or
barley. We expect that the young of cats will be kittens, of geese
will be goslings, of men will be human children, and we are never
disappointed. The law holds good under all circumstances.

We see, too, that there are certain race characteristics that
maintain. The Mongolian race has peculiar high cheek-bones, sallow
complexions and eyes set in bias, and we recognize the Japanese or
Chinese at once, even though dressed in the garb of our country. So,
too, we recognize the African or the Caucasian by certain marked
characteristics. This transmission of racial traits we call race
heredity.

Then each race has its own traits, physical or mental, which we
recognize as national, and so speak of them. We always mention thrift
as an attribute of the Teutonic nations; the Irishman we characterize
as witty and pugnacious; the Frenchman as polite; the American as
progressive.

Each individual has not only his human inheritance, his race
inheritance and his national characteristics, but he has also an
endowment of family traits.

But we are not made up of odds and ends of ancestral belongings alone.
We have in ourselves something that is original, that makes us
different from each other, and from all others. I have sometimes
thought that we are somewhat like patchwork quilts, the parti-colored
blocks being set together by some solid-colored material; or, better
still, we are like "hit and miss" rag carpets, with a warp of our own
individuality, filled in with a woof made of qualities and capacities
of all those who have preceded us.