Take our blue and red "child" and marry him to the child of a black bottle and a yellow bottle. This gives us a marriage between Red-Blue and Black-Yellow. The "child" bottle mixed from these two bottles of double colours will contain four colours. He will "inherit" from grandfather Red and grandmother Blue, from grandfather Black and grandmother Yellow, and from father Red-Blue and mother Black-Yellow. He will be like the six fore-parents, but different from each of them. Can we blame this "child" bottle for being made up of red, blue, black, and yellow? Can we blame it for having no purple nor white beads in its composition? No. These colours were mixed _for_ the child, and not _by_ it. How could there be white or purple beads in this bottle, when there were no white nor purple beads in the bottles from which it was filled? But what of the variation amongst brothers and sisters? That is easily understood. If the four colours in the ancestral bottles are evenly mixed, the grandchildren bottles will vary from their ancestors, but not from each other. As we know that brothers and sisters do vary from each other, we must conclude that the hereditary qualities are not evenly mixed. WHERE DO OUR NATURES COME FROM? For the scientific explanation of this fact I must refer you to _The Germ Plasm_, by Weissmann. For our purposes it is enough to know that brothers and sisters do vary from each other, and that they so vary because the ancestral qualities are not evenly distributed amongst the "sperms" and the "ova." On this head our own knowledge and observation do not leave any room for doubt. It is as if in the case of our marriage of Red-Blue and Black-Yellow there were three child-bottles, of which one got more red and yellow, one more blue and red, and one more yellow and blue than the others. So that the three brother-bottles would differ from their fore-parents and from each other. And as it would be foolish to blame the second bottle for having less red in it than the first, so it is foolish to blame a human child for having less intellect or less industry than his brothers. If you refer to the masterly description of the impregnation of the ova given in Haeckel's great work, _The Evolution of Man_, you will find that the heredity of brothers is largely a matter of accident. See the plate and explanation on page 130 in the first volume. The "variation" in brothers and sisters is like the variation in the mixing of beads in our bottles. It is as though we made several tartan plaids of the same four colours, but in different patterns. It is like dealing hands of cards from a shuffled pack. There are four suits, but one hand may be rich in clubs, another in diamonds. And who in a game of whist would blame his partner for holding no trumps in his hand? The partner could only play the trumps dealt out to him. In no way can a child control the pre-natal shuffling or dealing of the ancestral pack.