You know, in making "hit and miss"
rag carpets we take little strips and bits of various materials and
all colors, and sew them together without regard to order or
arrangement, and these long strips are woven back and forth in the
warp until the carpet is woven, showing no set pattern, but a mingling
of tints and shades that is sometimes crude and unsightly, sometimes
soft and artistic.

I used, in childhood, to find great delight in seeking among the
blended colors in the carpet for scraps of clothing which I recognized
as having belonged to father or mother, or perhaps even to
grandparents. Even now, in my maturer years, I am interested in
finding in myself the physical, mental or moral characteristics of
those same ancestors; and you, no doubt, can do the same, while some
of your traits seem to be yours entirely, constituting individual
variations upon ancestral inheritances.

Nature has been doing for centuries, unheeded, what the photographer
of to-day thinks is a modern discovery, that is, making composite
photographs of us all.

Through this law of inheritance have arisen the intellectual, the
moral or the criminal types of humanity, and the process is
continuing; the types are becoming more and more marked, or modifying
influences are being brought in to change the type.

These influences are also the result of law, even though we may not be
able to trace them to their cause. Knowing this, however, we begin to
see that heredity is not fatality; that the power to modify the
endowments of future generations is ours. To know how to employ it, we
should study the law as far as we have opportunity.

This subject is a large one, and no doubt you will some day want to
give it a thorough investigation. Just now, however, you will have to
accept my statements. I will not make them technical, but strictly
practical to you as a young woman desiring that knowledge which shall
best fit you for the responsibilities of future life.

A superficial study is rather discouraging. We see with what certainty
evil characteristics are transmitted, and we feel that the law is a
cruel one; but if we have patience we shall find that, like all laws
of God, its purpose is for the benefit of the race. Before we begin to
take comfort from the law let us first learn its warnings, one of
which is that all weakening of the individual, either in bodily
strength, in intellectual power or moral fiber, tends to produce a
like weakness in p