osterity. This is why I say to you that the young
people of the present have in their hands the welfare of the future.
Their habits to-day are moulding the possibilities of the race. Young
women may feel that their individual violation of the laws of health
is of no importance, but when they realize that the girls of to-day
are the mothers of the future, and that the physical strength or
weakness of each individual girl affects the average health of the
nation, not only now, but it may be through her posterity for
centuries, we can see that each girl's health is a matter of national
and of racial importance.

But it is not alone in the physical organization that we can trace the
law of heredity in the transmission of undesirable qualities. We find
that evil traits and tendencies of mind or morals are transmissible.
Galton finds that a bad temper is quite sure to be passed on from one
generation to the next, and any peculiarity of disposition in either
parents is quite likely to become an inheritance of the child. This
fact makes our little faults seem of vastly more importance than
otherwise. We can endure them in ourselves, but they strike us very
unpleasantly when we are obliged to see them manifested in our
children. As the poet says:

"Little faults unheeded, which I now despise;
For my baby took them with her hair and eyes."

It may not strike us very unpleasantly when we speak disrespectfully
to our parents, but when our own children show us lack of courtesy and
cheerful obedience it cuts deeply, and all the more deeply if we see
in their conduct but a repetition of our own.

Of course, if these minor faults are transmissible, we will not be
surprised that graver moral defects are passed on. The grandson of a
thief began to steal at three years of age, and at fourteen was an
expert pickpocket. The police records show the same family names
recurring year after year.

These cases are so grave as to attract attention, while we overlook
the fact that the smaller immoralities are as apt to be transmitted,
and perhaps with increased power. I should be afraid that slight lack
of strict integrity in the father might appear as actual crime in the
son.

I would not omit to mention also the law of Atavism, in this
discussion of heredity. This is that expression of the law in the
omission of one generation in the transmission of a quality. We
sometimes see the peculiarities or defects of a man or woman not
ma