t story or poem
could be prohibited, under severe penalties, the sum of night-howling
(erroneously attributed to lunar influence) would experience an audible
decrement, which, also, would enable the fire department to augment its
own uproar without reproach. There is, indeed, a considerable number of
ways in which we might effect a double reform--promoting the advantage
of Man, as well as medicating the mental fatigue of Dog. For another
example, it would be "a boon and a blessing to man" if Society would put
to death, or at least banish, the mill-man or manufacturer who persists
in apprising the entire community many times a day by means of a steam
whistle that it is time for his oppressed employees (every one of whom
has a gold watch) to go to work or to leave off. Such things not only
make a dog tired, they make a man mad. They answer with an accented
affirmative Truthful James' plaintive inquiry,

"Is civilization a failure,
Or is the Caucasian played out?"

Unquestionably, from his advantageous point of view as a looker-on at
the game, the dog is justified in the conviction that they are.

THE ANCESTRAL BOND

A WELL-KNOWN citizen of Ohio once discovered another man of the same
name exactly resembling him, and writing a "hand" which, including the
signature, he was unable to distinguish from his own. The two men
were unable to discover any blood relationship between them. It is
nevertheless almost absolutely certain that a relationship existed,
though it may have been so remote a degree that the familiar term
"forty-second cousin" would not have exaggerated the slenderness of the
tie. The phenomena of heredity have been inattentively noted; its laws
are imperfectly understood, even by Herbert Spencer and the prophets. My
own small study in this amazing field convinces me that a man is the
sum of his ancestors; that his character, moral and intellectual,
is determined before his birth. His environment with all its varied
suasions, its agencies of good and evil; breeding, training, interest,
experience and the rest of it--have little to do with the matter and can
not alter the sentence passed upon him at conception, compelling him to
be what he is.

Man is the hither end of an immeasurable line extending back to the
ultimate Adam--or, as we scientists prefer to name him, Protoplasmos.
Man travels, not the mental road that he would, but the one that he
must--is pushed this way and that by the resu