I had occasion two or three years ago to consider in an article on 'Strange Mental Feats,' in my _Science Byeways_, the question of inherited mental qualities and artistic habits, and would refer the reader for some remarkable instances of transmitted powers to that article.[18] Galton in his work on _Hereditary Genius_, and Ribot in his treatise on _Heredity_, have collected many facts bearing on this interesting question. Both writers show a decided bias in favour of a view which would give to heredity a rather too important position among the factors of genius. Cases are cited which seem very little to the purpose, and multitudes of instances are omitted which oppose themselves, at a first view at any rate, to the belief that heredity plays the first part in the genesis of great minds. Nearly all the greatest names in philosophy, literature, and science, and a great number of the greatest names in art, stand absolutely alone. We know nothing achieved by the father or grandfather of Shakspeare, or of Goethe, or Schiller, or Evans (George Eliot), or Thackeray, or Dickens, or Huxley. None of Newton's family were in any way distinguished in mathematical or scientific work; nor do we know of a distinguished Laplace, or Lagrange, or Lavoisier, or Harvey, or Dalton, or Volta, or Faraday, besides those who made these names illustrious. As to general literature, page after page might be filled with the mere names of those whose ancestry has been quite undistinguished. To say that among the ancestors of Goethe, Schiller, Byron, and so forth, certain qualities, virtues or vices, passions or insensibilities to passion, may be recognised 'among the ancestors of men of science, certain aptitudes for special subjects or methods of research,' among the ancestors of philosophers and literary men certain qualities or capabilities, and that such ancestral peculiarities determined the poetic, scientific, or literary genius of the descendant, is in reality to little purpose, for there is probably not a single family possessing claims to culture in any civilised country among the members of which individuals might not be found with qualities thus emphasised so to speak. Such _à posteriori_ reasoning is valueless. If instances could be so classified that after carefully studying them we could make even the roughest approach to a guess respecting the cases in which a family might be expected to produce men of any particular qualities, there would be some use in these attempts at generalisation; at present all that can be said is that some mental qualities and some artistic aptitudes have unquestionably in certain instances been transmitted, and that on the whole men of great distinction in philosophy, literature, science, and art, are rather more likely than others to have among their relations (more or less remote) persons somewhat above the average in mental or artistic qualities. But it is not altogether