Man is the hither end of an immeasurable line extending back to the ultimate Adam—or, as we scientists prefer to name him, Protoplasmos. Man travels, not the mental road that he would, but the one that he must—is pushed this way and that by the resultant of all the forces behind him; for each member of the ancestral line, though dead, yet pusheth. In one of what Dr. Holmes calls his “medicated novels,” _The Guardian Angel_, this truth is most admirably and lucidly set forth with abundant instance and copious exposition. Upon another work of his—in which he erroneously affirms the influence of circumstance and environment—let us lay a charitable hand and fling it into the fire. Clearly all a man’s ancestors have not equal power in shaping his character. Conceiving them, according to our figure, as arranged in line behind him and influential in the ratio of their individuality, we shall get the best notion of their method by supposing them to have taken their places in an order somewhat independent of chronology and a little different from their arrangement behind his brother. Immediately at his back, with a controlling hand (a trifle skinny) upon him, may stand his great-grandmother, while his father may be many removes arear. Or the place of power may be held by some fine old Asian gentleman who flourished before the confusion of tongues on the plain of Shinar; or by some cave-dweller who polished the bone of life in Bythynia and was perhaps a respectable and honest troglodyte. Sometimes a whole platoon of ancestors appears to have been moved backward or forward _en bloc_, not, we may be sure, capriciously, but in obedience to some law that we do not understand. I know a man to whose character not an ancestor since the seventeenth century appears to have contributed an element. Intellectually he is a contemporary of John Dryden, whom naturally he reveres as the greatest of poets. There was another who inherited his handwriting from his great-grandfather, although trained to “the Spencerian system” that he tried vainly to acquire. Furthermore, his handwriting followed the same order of progressive development as that of his great-grandfather. At the age of twenty he wrote exactly as that ancestor did at the same age, and, although at forty-five his chirography was nothing like what it was even ten years before, it was accurately like his great-grandfather’s at forty-five. Discovery of some old letters showed him how his great-grandfather wrote, and accounted for the dissimilarity of his own handwriting to that of any known member of his family, or his teachers.