ng, to the
sides of her face, in exactly the same manner as her father had done, and
sometimes even still continued to do when alone. I never heard of any one
excepting this one man and his little daughter who had this strange habit;
and certainly imitation was in this instance out of the question.

Some writers have doubted whether those complex mental attributes, on which
genius and talent depend, are inherited, even when both parents are thus
endowed. But he who will read Mr. Galton's able paper[11] on hereditary
talent will have his doubts allayed.

Unfortunately it matters not, as far as inheritance is concerned, how
injurious a quality or structure may be if compatible with life. No one can
read the many treatises[12] on hereditary disease and doubt this. The
ancients were strongly of this opinion, or, as Ranchin expresses it, _Omnes
Graeci, Arabes, et Latini in eo consentiunt_. A long catalogue could be
given of all sorts of inherited malformations and of predisposition to
various diseases. With gout, fifty per cent. of the cases observed in
hospital practice are, according to Dr. Garrod, inherited, and a greater
percentage in private practice. Every one knows how often insanity runs in
families, and some of the cases given by Mr. Sedgwick are awful,--as of a
surgeon, whose brother, father, and four paternal uncles were all insane,
the latter dying by suicide; of a Jew, whose father, mother, and six
brothers and sisters were all mad; and in some other cases several members
of the same family, during three or four successive generations, have
committed suicide. Striking instances {8} have been recorded of epilepsy,
consumption, asthma, stone in the bladder, cancer, profuse bleeding from
the slightest injuries, of the mother not giving milk, and of bad
parturition being inherited. In this latter respect I may mention an odd
case given by a good observer,[13] in which the fault lay in the offspring,
and not in the mother: in a part of Yorkshire the farmers continued to
select cattle with large hind-quarters, until they made a strain called
"Dutch-buttocked," and "the monstrous size of the buttocks of the calf was
frequently fatal to the cow, and numbers of cows were annually lost in
calving."

Instead of giving numerous details on various inherited malformations
and diseases, I will confine myself to one organ, that which is the
most complex, delicate, and probably best-known in the human frame,
na