themselves to be
excessively attached to women."

"'Yudhishthira said, "There are men who belong to the mixed castes, and
who are of very impure birth. Though presenting the features of
respectability, they are in reality disrespectable. In consequence of
these external aspects we may not be able to know the truth about their
birth. Are there any signs, O grandsire, by which the truth may be known
about the origin of such men?"'"

SECTION XLIX

"'Bhishma said, "A person that is born of an irregular union presents
diverse features of disposition. One's purity of birth, again, is to be
ascertained from one's acts which must resemble the acts of those who are
admittedly good and righteous. A disrespectable behaviour, acts opposed
to those laid down in the scriptures, crookedness and cruelty, and
abstention from sacrifices and other spiritual acts that lead to merit,
proclaim one's impurity of origin. A son receives the disposition of
either the sire or the mother. Sometimes he catches the dispositions of
both. A person of impure birth can never succeed in concealing his true
disposition. As the cub of a tiger or a leopard resembles its sire and
dam in form and in (the matter of) its stripes of spots, even so a person
cannot but betray the circumstance of his origin. However covered may the
course of one's descent be, if that descent happens to be impure, its
character or disposition is sure to manifest itself slightly or largely.
A person may, for purposes of his own, choose to tread on an insincere
path, displaying such conduct as seems to be righteous. His own
disposition, however, in the matter of those acts that he does, always
proclaims whether he belongs to a good order or to a different one.
Creatures in the world are endued with diverse kinds of disposition. They
are, again, seen to be employed in diverse kinds of acts. Amongst
creatures thus employed, there is nothing that is so good or precious as
pure birth and righteous conduct. If a person be born in a low order,
that good understanding which arises from a study of the scriptures fails
to rescue his body from low acts. Absolute goodness of understanding may
be of different degrees. It may be high, middling, or low. Even if it
appears in a person of low extraction, it disappears like autumnal clouds
without producing any consequences. On the other hand, that other
goodness of understanding which, according to its measure, has ordained
the status in which