These thoughts introduce to us a theme on which volumes have been written and spoken. Men of deep research and profound judgment have been ready to say to all the parents of earth, "Whatever ye are such will also your children prove always, and in every particular to be;" and there are not wanting multitudes of facts to strengthen and confirm the position. In certain aspects of it it is assuredly true, since the principal characteristics of the race remain from age to age the same. Nor is it disproved by what seem at first adverse facts, for although children seem in physical and intellectual constitution often the direct opposite of their parents, yet a close study into the history of families may only prove, that if unlike those parents in general character, they have nevertheless inherited that particular phase which governed the period from which they date their existence. No person bears through life precisely the same dispositions, or is at all times equally under the same influences or governed by the same motives. The gentle and amiable by nature may come into circumstances which shall induce unwonted irritability and ill-humor; the irascible and passionate, surrounded in some favored time, by all that heart can wish, may seem as lovely as though no evil tempers had ever deformed them; and the children who may be the offspring of these episodes in life, may bear indeed a character differing wholly from the usual character of their parents, but altogether corresponding to the brief and unusual state which ruled their hour of beginning life. So is it also in physical constitution. The feeble and sickly have sometimes intervals of health, and the robust see months of languor and disease. Hence, perhaps, the differences which are observable many times in the children of the same family with regard to health and natural vigor.