It is very difficult--indeed impossible until much more is written and read on the subjects of breeding and of psychology--to persuade people to abandon the notion that a man who has drunk good wine and conversed with interesting people will, as a direct result, transmit something which he has “taken up” or absorbed from the good wine and the clever people to his offspring, and that a faculty for this or that art or accomplishment cultivated by generation after generation is increased thereby, and transferred as it were into the very vitals of the race--the reproductive germs which each individual has within him. There is no truth whatever in these fancies. They are popular and very natural delusions, which are not only devoid of direct proof by simple observation and experiment, such as that made by all breeders of stock and by medical men, but are also contrary to the great general principles which have been found to explain the varied and most important facts known as to breeding, inheritance, and variation. The same erroneous theory of inheritance now applied to royalty has been put forward in regard to the feeble-minded, the ill-grown, and the incapable at the other end of the social scale. The only way in which a quality, good or bad, desirable or undesirable, is intensified, made inherent and dominant in a race or strain or family, is by selective breeding--selection due to natural rejection of those individuals not possessing the quality, or to artificial rejection of such individuals by the stock owner and breeder. No human maker of breeds--whether of cattle, horses, birds, or plants--ever yet proceeded by exercising, feeding, educating, or otherwise manipulating his sires and dams; he simply selects those as parents which by natural variation have the quality, more or less, which he desires, and he destroys or sterilises those which fail to satisfy his requirements. He is perfectly confident that in this way he can ensure the reproduction and exaggeration or dominance of the characteristics which he desires; he knows that he cannot obtain a “strain” or “breed” by any treatment, any feeding, or education of those which are born without the natural, innate possession of the desired quality, in a more or less marked degree. Once the characteristic turns up as a congenital variation, it can be intensified by coupling its possessor with a mate of like quality; but both sire and dam have to be rigidly selected with this purpose in view. Such methods are not adopted in human families, even royal ones.