nce_, vol. xvi.

When crime is not an inherited taint, but merely an acquired habit,
this fact has an important practical bearing upon the proper method of
dealing with it. Acquired habits, we are now being taught by Professor
Weismann, are incapable of being transmitted to posterity, and Mr.
Galton is of the same opinion.[42] This is not the place to elaborate
the theory of inheritance, as understood by those writers; its
essence, however, is that we only inherit the natural faculties of our
forebears, and not those faculties which they have acquired by
practice and experience. The son of a rope-dancer does not inherit his
father's faculties for rope-dancing, nor the son of an orator his
father's ready aptitude for public speech, nor the son of a designer
his father's acquired skill in the making of designs. All that the son
inherits is the natural faculties of the parent, but no more. Hence it
follows that the son of a thief, on the supposition that thieving
comes by habit and practice, does not by natural inheritance acquire
the parent's criminal propensity. As far as his natural faculties are
concerned he starts life free from the vicious habits of his parent,
and should he in turn become a thief, as sometimes happens, it is not
because he has inherited his father's thievish habits, but because he
has himself acquired them. It is imitation, not instinct, which
transforms him into a thief; and if he is removed from the influence
of evil example he will have almost as small a chance of falling into
a criminal life as any other member of the community. It will not be
quite so small, because no public institution, however well conducted,
can ever exercise so moralising an effect as a good home, but it will
be much smaller than if he grew up to maturity under the pernicious
surroundings of a criminal home.

[42] _Die Continuitaet des Keimplasma als Grundlage einer Theorie
der Vererbung_. A. Weismann. Jena, 1885. _Natural Inheritance_.
F. Galton.

If we do not inherit the acquired faculties and habits of our parents,
it is unfortunately too true that we inherit their diseases and the
connection between disease and crime is a fact which cannot be denied.
In many cases it is perfectly true that persons suffering from disease
or physical degeneracy do not become criminals, in most cases they do
not; at the same time a larger proportion of such persons fall into a
lawless life than is the case with people who a