Doubtless much might be done to reclaim our dogs from their uncheerful state of mind by abstention from debate on the protective tariff; by excluding them from the churches, at least during the sermons; by keeping them off the streets and out of hearing when rites of prostration are in performance before visiting notables; by forbidding anyone to read aloud in their hearing the more phrenetic articles in the newspapers, and by educating them to the belief that labor and capital are illusions. A limitation of the annual output of popular novels would undoubtedly reduce the dejection, which could be still further mitigated by abolition of the more successful magazines. If the dialect story or poem could be prohibited, under severe penalties, the sum of night-howling (erroneously attributed to lunar influence) would experience an audible decrement, which, also, would enable the fire department to augment its own uproar without reproach. There is, indeed, a considerable number of ways in which we might effect a double reform—promoting the advantage of Man, as well as medicating the mental fatigue of Dog. For another example, it would be “a boon and a blessing to men” if society would put to death, or at least banish, the millman or manufacturer who persists in apprising the entire community many times a day by means of a steam whistle that it is time for his oppressed employees (every one of whom has a gold watch) to go to work or to leave off. Such things not only make a dog tired, they make a man mad. They answer with an accented affirmative Truthful James’s plaintive inquiry, Is civilization a failure, Or is the Caucasian played out? Unquestionably, from his advantageous point of view as a looker-on at the game, the dog is justified in the conviction that they are. THE ANCESTRAL BOND A well-known citizen of Ohio once discovered another man of the same name exactly resembling him, and writing a “hand” which, including the signature, he was unable to distinguish from his own. The two men were unable to discover any blood relationship between them. It is nevertheless almost certain that a relationship existed, though it may have been so remote a degree that the familiar term “forty-second cousin” would not have exaggerated the slenderness of the tie. The phenomena of heredity seem to me to have been inattentively noted, its laws imperfectly understood, even by Herbert Spencer and the prophets. My own small study in this amazing field convinces me that a man is the sum of his ancestors; that his character, moral and intellectual, is determined before his birth. His environment with all its varied suasions, its agencies of good and evil; breeding, training, interest, experience and the rest of it—have less to do with the matter and can not annul the sentence passed upon him at conception, compelling him to be what he is.