ver amount of power an organism expends in any shape is the
correlate and equivalent of a power that was taken into it from
without."--_Herbert Spencer._

Students of Biography will observe that in all well-written Lives
attention is concentrated for the first few chapters upon two points. We
are first introduced to the family to which the subject of memoir
belonged. The grandparents, or even the more remote ancestors, are
briefly sketched and their chief characteristics brought prominently
into view. Then the parents themselves are photographed in detail. Their
appearance and physique, their character, their disposition, their
mental qualities, are set before us in a critical analysis. And finally
we are asked to observe how much the father and the mother respectively
have transmitted of their peculiar nature to their offspring. How
faithfully the ancestral lines have met in the latest product, how
mysteriously the joint characteristics of body and mind have blended,
and how unexpected yet how entirely natural a recombination is the
result--these points are elaborated with cumulative effect until we
realize at last how little we are dealing with an independent unit, how
much with a survival and reorganization of what seemed buried in the
grave.

In the second place, we are invited to consider more external
influences--schools and schoolmasters, neighbors, home, pecuniary
circumstances, scenery, and, by-and-by, the religious and political
atmosphere of the time. These also we are assured have played their part
in making the individual what he is. We can estimate these early
influences in any particular case with but small imagination if we fail
to see how powerfully they also have moulded mind and character, and in
what subtle ways they have determined the course of the future life.

This twofold relation of the individual, first, to his parents, and
second, to his circumstances, is not peculiar to human beings. These two
factors are responsible for making all living organisms what they are.
When a naturalist attempts to unfold the life-history of any animal, he
proceeds precisely on these same lines. Biography is really a branch of
Natural History; and the biographer who discusses his hero as the
resultant of these two tendencies, follows the scientific method as
rigidly as Mr. Darwin in studying "Animals and Plants under
Domestication."

Mr. Darwin, following Weismann, long ago pointed out that there are