George Eliot was a thorough believer in the Darwinian theories of heredity, and she has in all her books shown the effects of hereditary conditions on the individual and even upon a people. Family and race are made to play a very important part in her writings. Other novelists disregard the conditions and limitations imposed by heredity, and consider the individual as unrestricted by other laws than those of his own will; but George Eliot gives conspicuous prominence to the laws of heredity, both individual and social. Felix Holt never ceases in her pages to be the son of his mother, however enlarged his ideas may become and broad his culture. Rosamond Vincy also has a parentage, and so has Mary Garth. Daniel Deronda is a Jew by birth, the son of a visionary mother and a truth-seeking father. This parentage expresses itself throughout his life, even in boyhood, in all his thought and conduct. Heredity shapes the destiny of Tito Melema, Romola, Fedalma, Maggie Tulliver, Will Ladislaw, Gwendolen Harleth and many another character in George Eliot's novels. It is even more strongly presented in her poems. In _The Spanish Gypsy_ she describes Fedalma as a genuine daughter of her father, as inheriting his genius and tendencies, which are stronger than all the Spanish culture she had received. When Fedalma says she belongs to him she loves, and that love is nature too, Forming a fresher law than laws of birth,-- Zarca replies,-- Unmake yourself, then, from a Zincala-- Unmake yourself from being child of mine! Take holy water, cross your dark skin white; Round your proud eyes to foolish kitten looks; Walk mincingly, and smirk, and twitch your robe: Unmake yourself--doff all the eagle plumes And be a parrot, chained to a ring that slips Upon a Spaniard's thumb, at will of his That you should prattle o'er his words again! Fedalma cannot unmake herself; she has already danced in the plaza, and she is soon convinced that she is a Zincala, that her place is with her father and his tribe. The Prior had declared,-- That maiden's blood Is as unchristian as the leopard's, and it so proves. His statement of reasons for this conviction expresses the author's own belief. What! Shall the trick of nostrils and of lips Descend through generations, and the soul That moves within our frame like God in worlds-- Convulsing, urging, melting, withering-- Imprint no record, leave no documents, Of her great history? Shall men bequeath The fancies of their palates to their sons, And shall the shudder of restraining awe, The slow-wept tears of contrite memory, Faith's prayerful labor, and the food divine Of fasts ecstatic--shall these pass away Like wind upon the waters, tracklessly? Shall the mere curl of eyelashes remain, And god-enshrining symbols leave no trace Of tremors reverent?