nambulism vision is possible to those born blind and certain
people can see things that are happening a great distance away, and
their reports have been proved correct; certain phenomena of
double-consciousness cannot be explained without the plurality--the
duality, at all events--of the vehicles of consciousness.

To return to the _role_ played by the germ in the question of
heredity, we repeat that the physical germ, of itself alone, explains
only a portion of man; it throws light on the physical side of
heredity, but leaves in as great darkness as ever the problem of
intellectual and moral faculty. If it represented the whole man, one
would expect to find in any individual the qualities manifested in his
progenitors or parents--never any other; these qualities could not
exceed the amount possessed by the parents, whereas we find criminals
from birth in the most respectable families and saints born to parents
who are the very scum of society. You may come across twins, _i.e._,
beings born from the same germs, under the same conditions of time
and environment, one of whom is an angel and the other a demon,
though their physical forms closely resemble each other.

Child prodigies are sufficiently numerous to frequently trouble the
thinker with the problem of heredity. Whence came that irresistible
impulse towards poetry in Ovid which showed itself from his earliest
youth and in the end overcame the vigorous opposition of his parents?

Pascal in his youth met with keen opposition from his parents, who
forbade him to think of mathematics and geometry. He besought his
father to tell him, at all events, "what was that science of which he
was forbidden to think, and what it treated of." The answer was given
to him that "it is the method of making correct figures and finding
out the proportions they bear to each other." With nothing more than
this information and the aid of reflection, he discovered for himself
the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid by means of "circles and
lines" traced in secret.

Mozart, at the age of three, learnt the clavecin by watching his
sister play; a year afterwards he composed admirably, at the age of
seven he played the violin at first sight without having had any
teacher, and proved himself a composer of genius before he reached his
twelfth birthday.

Pepito Ariola, the little Spaniard, was only three years of age when,
about ten years ago, he filled with astonishment the Court of Madr