But though the parents of Edwin did not try to neutralize the influence of purely American circumstances of neighborhood and schooling for their child, they could not help transmitting the organic individual heritage of their respective nationalities in his very generation and development. The generic features and qualities of every one are stamped in his constitution from the historic soil and social climate and organized life of the country of the parents through whom he derives his being from the aboriginal Source of Being. Certain peculiar modes of acting and reacting on nature and things--modes derived from peculiarities of ancestral experience, natural scenery, social institutions, and other conditions of existence--constitute those different styles of humanity called races or nations. These peculiarities of constitution, temper, taste, conduct, looks, characterize in varying degrees all the individuals belonging to a country, making them Englishmen, Spaniards, Russians, Turks, or Chinese. These characteristics, drawn from what a whole people have in common, are transmitted by parents to their progeny and inwrought in their organic being by a law as unchangeable as destiny,--nay, by a law which _is_ destiny. The law may, in some cases, baffle our scrutiny by the complexity of the elements in the problem, or it may be qualified by fresh conditions, but it is always there, working in every point of plasma, every fibril of nerve, every vibration of force. The law of heredity is obscured or masked in several ways. First, the peculiarities of the two lines of transmitted ancestry, from father and from mother, may in their union neutralize each other, or supplement each other, or exaggerate each other, or combine to form new traits. Secondly, they may be modified by the reaction of the original personality of the new being, and also by the reaction of the new conditions in which he is placed. Still, the law is there, and works. It is at once the fixed fatality of nature and the free voice of God. Edwin Forrest was fortunate in the national bequests of brain and blood or structural fitnesses and tendencies which he received from his fatherland and from his motherland. The distinctive national traits of the Scottish and of the German character, regarded on the favorable side, were signally exemplified in him. The traits of the former are courage, acuteness, thrift, tenacity, clannishness, and patriotism; of the latter, reasoning intelligence, poetic sentiment, honesty, personal freedom, capacity for systematic drill, and open sense of humanity. These two lines of prudential virtue and expansive sympathy were marked in his career. The attributes of weakness or vice that belonged to him were rather human than national. So the Caledonian and Teutonic currents that met in his American veins were an inheritance of goodness and strength.