I do not see why it should have been so, for all my relations and friends occupied high places in the public service, but as I had no father to open my eyes, and to stimulate my ambition—he having died before I was four years old—my ideas of life and its possibilities were evidently taken from my young widowed mother, whose one desire was to be left alone, much as the world tempted her, then not yet thirty years old, to give up her mourning and to return to society. Thus it soon became my own philosophy of life, to be left alone, free to go my own way, or like Diogenes, to live in my own tub. Here we see what I call the influence of circumstances, of surroundings, or as others call it, of environment. This, however, is very different from atavism, as we shall see presently. Atavism also has been called a kind of environment, attacking us and influencing us from the past, and as it were, from behind, from the North in fact instead of the South, the East, and the West, and from all the points of the compass. But atavism means really a very different thing, if indeed it means anything at all. I must ease my conscience once for all on this point, and say what I feel about atavism and environment. Environment in the shape of friends, of locality, and other material circumstances, has certainly influenced my life very much, and I could never see why such a hybrid word as environment should be used instead of surroundings or circumstances. Creatures of circumstances would be far better understood than creatures of environment; but environment, I suppose, would sound more scientific. Atavism also is a new word, instead of family likeness, but unless carefully defined, the word is very apt to mislead us. When it is said[4] that children often resemble their grandfathers or grandmothers more than their immediate parents, and that this propensity is termed atavism, this does not seem quite correct even etymologically, for atavus in Latin did not mean father or grandfather, but at first great-great-great-grandfather, and then only ancestors; and what should be made quite clear is that this mysterious atavism should not be used by careful speakers, to express the supposed influence of parents or even grandparents, but that of more distant ancestors only, and possibly of a whole family. [4] _Oxford Dictionary_, s. v.; J. Rennie, _Science of Gardening_, p. 113.