plasm have been so affected by long continued generation, that
some of the peculiar qualities of the vine have become constant.

The child of a negro must always be a negro; his peculiarities are
constant, though it may be quite true that the negro and other races
are not different species, but only varieties rendered constant by
immense periods of time. What the cause of these constant and
inconstant peculiarities may be, not even Weismann has yet been able
to explain satisfactorily.

The deafness of my mother and the prevalence of the misfortune in
numerous members of her family acted on me as a kind of external
influence, as something belonging to the environment of my life; it
never frightened me as an atavistic evil. It justified me in being
cautious and in being prepared for the worst, and so far it may be
said to have helped in shaping or narrowing the course of my life.
Fortunately, however, this tendency to deafness seems now to have
exhausted itself. In my own generation there is one case only, and the
next two generations, children and grandchildren of mine, show no
signs of it. If, on the other hand, my son was congratulated when
entering the diplomatic service, on being the son of his father, it is
clear that the difference between inherited and acquired qualities, so
strongly insisted on by Weismann, had not been fully appreciated by
his friends. Besides, my own power of speaking foreign languages has
always been very limited, and I have many times declined the
compliment of being a second Mezzofanti.[5] I worked at languages as a
musician studies the nature and capacities of musical instruments,
though without attempting to perform on every one of them. There was
no time left for acquiring a practical familiarity with languages, if
I wanted to carry on my researches into the origin, the nature and
history of language. My own study of languages could therefore have
been of very little use to me, nor did my son himself perceive such an
advantage in learning to converse in French, Spanish, Turkish, &c. The
facts were wrong, and the theory of atavism perfectly unreasonable as
applied to such a case.

[5] _Science of Language_, vol. i. p. 24 (1861).

If the theory of atavism were stretched so far, it would soon do away
with free will altogether. That heredity has something to do with our
moral character, no one would deny who knows the influence of our
national, nay even of racial character. We are Aryan