No, a thousand times no! Environment is not all nor nearly all--nay, not nearly half. Says Lombroso: "The action of climate and circumstance is very slight by the side of heredity" (_op. cit._, p. 88). Saith Heraclitus, "Much learning does not teach to have mind"; saith Pindar, "His art is true who by nature hath knowledge," and he scorns the crows that have but learned. Let the outer impact be what it will, it is the "inherent" qualities that determine the response. Sing out the natural C; among a score of tuning-forks only one will reply. Nay more; different constitutions may make exactly opposite replies: "the roar of the lion scatters the sheep, but gathers the jackals"; the prayer of Clarence but hardens the heart of the first murderer, though it softens the soul of the second. All this, one would think, a child might understand. Nature blazons it on every leaf and every star, and proclaims it with a million tongues; but overhumane doctrinaires will neither see nor hear anything that impugns their sacrosanct dogma, that "all men are created equal". "The trend of authoritative opinion" insists on "minimizing the degree of difference of mental capacity" and regarding the mental gap as more apparent than real and due rather to experience and training than to innate factors--whereat the current philanthropy claps its hands and cries, "Eureka! Come, now! Let us train and experience the Negro and close up the mental gap in a jiffy"! But will some manufacturer or wholesale importer of "authoritative opinions" kindly inform us what "mental gap" has ever been closed up by "experience and training"? Great, indeed, is the potence of "environment"; greater, by far, the potence of heredity. Fortunately we are not left quite in the dark as to their relative importance. In discussing "race suicide" an eminent scholar, who is always sage and sagacious, save only when _celeri saucius Africo_, declares: "That those who are intellectually the best in each generation should leave the fewest descendants is a serious thing; for all the recent work in anthropology teaches the importance of heredity, and tends to prove Galton's theory that genius is inherited." From a study of the one thousand most eminent men of history, but for whom "the world would have made little progress in learning, invention or wealth," Processor Cattell concludes that "heredity, including in that term both stability and variability of stock, is more potent than social tradition or physical environment." From a study of European royal genealogies, it is deduced by Dr. F. A. Woods, of Harvard, that "heredity has exercised in mental life a factor not far from nine-tenths, while from the moral side something over one-half."