=Who was to blame?=--I once met a family during one of my lecture courses and was entertained in the home over night. Their children, five in number, all during my lecture picked at each other, scratched each other, fought each other, fussed, quarreled and cried. As we rode in the carriage to their home and during our visit those youngsters kept up this same line of entertainment. After I had retired the man stepped into my room and whispered to me that he and his wife were in great trouble, that they had been at the point of separation for ten years and asked me to teach them how to live happily together, and to be less miserable. I asked him to tell me the cause of their inharmony. “Oh, there is but one trouble between wife and me!” He spoke as if that were quite insignificant. Finally he told me that the trouble in the home was, “neither of us can control our tempers.” As he left my room I realized that for once in life I had a government contract on my hands. Then I mused: “Ten years of quarreling, ten years of disagreement, ten years of family feuds and family strife and these parents have transmitted more of bad disposition to their children than the children will be able to conquer in a lifetime, or these parents will be able to whip out of them before they are of age, chasing them around over a three-hundred-acre farm.” Continuing my meditation I thought: “If I had the power to make laws, I would make a law of mercy for such unfortunate children as these. That law would provide that where parents transmit as much unnecessary devilment to their children as these parents have to theirs, that the children should have the legal right to whip their daddies and mammies.” =The child not an exact duplicate of either parent.=--These parents had produced their mental and moral states in their children. These illustrations will help you to understand the philosophy of heredity. The two cells that unite to form the initial of every new life are elaborated from the blood of their respective parents and each cell has the physical, mental and moral natures of its parents in potential form. Were it possible for a child to inherit its size, form, features, disposition, tendencies, etc., from only one of its parents, and to grow to maturity uninfluenced by environment and education, it would necessarily be an exact duplicate of that parent. Because of its dual parentage, the maternal impressions received before birth, and the ever varying influences of environment and education, the child will be unlike any other person that ever lived.