Indulgence should be shown to nervous children who suffer from convulsions, or are predisposed to such. One must be kind to them and not oppose their caprices with too much severity, unless they are actually insensate. Even loving punishment provokes an explosion of grief and nervous agitation in these unhappy children; every violent emotion leaves an imperceptible, morbid, accumulative tendency behind. In opposing them one falls 'out of the frying-pan into the fire.’ It is better to preserve their lives and postpone stricter education till they become less sensitive; in the meantime they must not be fatigued with study, but strengthened like a plant which one places in the sun and open air, and from which one prunes the injurious shoots at a later time. This is often successful, and then they may be ranked again with healthy children. Even for the latter, premature education is a very grievous error. Parents who make their children learn too many things, sacrifice their future to gratify their own ambition. Nature must not be forced, nor the activity of the nervous system exhausted before the body has grown strong. Parents who have already some weak spot--a little fault in the character, a slight blemish in the organism--should redouble their care in order to cure their children from their own defects. Just as a scirrhus, cancer, consumption, neurosis, are transmitted from one generation to another, just as the large mouth, the long nose, the eyes and hair of this or that colour, are inherited, so vices, virtues, and moral dispositions are handed down from family to family. In little villages especially, in which one may best trace the customs of an ancestor in the whole of his descendants, one often hears such sayings as 'His father was just the same; his grandfather was a great good-for-nothing, too.’ 'Generosity is hereditary in that house.’ Thus were cynicism and cruelty transmitted from one to another in the family of the Claudii. The root of a family tree may be compared to one of those Chinese boxes full of other boxes gradually decreasing in size, the unending succession of which strikes us with wonder. Marriage and intermarriage with other families mix and mingle these boxes in such a way that an inextricable confusion arises; but if from some height we could watch the long line of generations, we should see that they continue slowly to disclose themselves. Some children resemble the grandfather, the great-grandfather, or the great-great-grandfather, as though a seed had passed through several generations without unclosing, and then had suddenly sprung into life with such resemblance in features, manners, voice, eyes, character, that the old people recognise it and say, 'He is the very image of his grandfather.’ Thus the forefathers are born and live again in future generations. III