Darwin, whom we all love and honor, says: "The whole subject of inheritance is wonderful," and in this he but voices the universal sentiment of those who have given any serious consideration to it. Let me try to show you how wonderful it is by an illustration. From very ancient times the horse has been the constant companion of man. This animal, with his splendid muscular system, the most perfect, perhaps, of any creature, has for his food and shelter, and not always the best of these, rendered mankind almost infinite service. Now, every horse that has ever been born into the world began life as a minute ovum, which under the microscope presents no appearance of a horse, or any other animal, and, strange to say, this ovum is, to all appearance, like the ovum of other animals, and no amount of study, without knowing its origin, can decide whether it will develop as a dog, an ox, a horse or a man. After, however, it has gone through the process of gestation, this apparently simple egg becomes an animal of a very complex nature, with heart, lungs, brain, eyes, ears, mouth, stomach, and blood vessels, all where they should be and ready to perform their functions; with mental traits of a peculiar kind which adapt him to the service which man requires. Nay more: In the process of the evolution of the horse, little by little he has changed in various ways, and many, if not all of these changes in his bodily constitution and in his mental characteristics, which have been found useful or made him more serviceable to man, his greater docility, his increased size, his enormous strength and speed, his wonderful beauty, through a wise selection and the weeding out of the unfit on the part of the breeder, have been transmitted through heredity to his offspring, so that today only a paleontologist can tell us if he finds the remains of a primitive horse, that it belongs to the same class of animals as the horse of our time. THEORIES.--Our theories of heredity will depend on the extent of our knowledge, and especially our knowledge of embryology. In the last century knowledge on this subject was very meagre, especially that part of embryology which could only be studied with the microscope; consequently the views of scientists and others of that time were exceedingly crude. The most important was that of Malphigi and Bonnet, who maintained that the miniature animal existed in the egg; that fertilization by the male element simply furnished it with food for growth, and that this was added to and stored up in its interstices. Cuvier, Haller and Leibnitz adopted substantially these views. The latter found them to support his opinion that everything was the result of growth from monads, and that there was no such thing in all nature as generation.