Heredity is race memory. Physical heredity is memory and perpetuation of physical characteristics, like legs, arms, senses, color, etc., but is constantly being modified by environment. Mental heredity does not follow the physical but is a sensitive undeveloped film which holds itself a blank in the darkness but develops in the light of environment. While physical heredity goes on adding to its proportions, if allowed to normally develop, newly-born mentality must be attended by example, books, or other monuments, to start it on the plane of intelligence of its progenitors or it becomes as blank as that of a savage; with force, but no aim. The remarkable mental difference of children, while there is strong physical resemblance, in a family, denies the close continuity or potency of mental heredity in the matter of equipment and tendencies, which constitute the basis of character. The force is there but each is a distinct, new and important message from the Creator, given us to interpret and cultivate according to the best intelligence available to us. NOTE: The careful observations of Ernest Bicknell, Esquire, (secretary of the Indiana Board of State Charities, at the time the observations were made, but at present secretary of the Associated Charities of the City of Chicago,) relative to the transmission of Feeble Mind in parents to their offspring, only serve to strengthen our assertion relative to mental heredity. Feeble Mind is a lack of healthy brain tissue and relates to quantity of mind possibility, while mental bent is a matter of quality and is amenable to direction of aim, either in the direction of good, or in the direction of bad efforts. Ingenuous childhood prefers the good in all normal cases, even if its home surroundings are perverse, for the good is sweeter, and children are especially susceptible to the allurement of sweets. The ranks of greatness and genius are usually filled from humble parental sources, in which character dominates over a desire for material accumulation, and rarely from greatness or genius itself, whose child-product, under parental neglect--or possibly shadow--frequently drops to an insignificant place in the scale of usefulness. If any fixed, progressive, inexorable law of mental heredity were in force in evolution, these tendencies would be reversed. Mind is Nature's one unknown quantity, except that it is good in preference to being bad, if it is given a chance to choose; progressive, if deterrents to its normal growth are removed from about it, but reactive and resentful if denied the blessing of cultivation. The efficacy of Character-Building schools lies in their ability to teach children how to aim. What they learn while character is forming is their chief equipment in life.