Beethoven had for a maternal grandmother an excellent musician. The mother of Mozart gave the first lessons to her son. A crowd of composers have descended from John Sebastian Bach, who long stood unrivaled as a performer on the organ, and composer for that instrument. It may be remarked here, that it is almost invariably true that the ability or inability to acquire a knowledge of music is derived from the ancestry. Parents who cannot turn a tune or tell one note from another, bring forth children equally unmoved 'with concord of sweet sounds.' Examples could easily be adduced at still greater length, illustrating the direct influence of the father over the daughter, and of the mother over the son. Those given will suffice. INFLUENCE Of EDUCATION OVER INHERITED QUALITIES. In correcting the evil effects of inheritance on the mind, education plays a very important part. A child born with a tendency to some vice or intellectual trait, may have this tendency entirely overcome, or at least modified, by training. So, also, virtues implanted by nature may be lost during the plastic days of youth, in consequence of bad associations and bad habits. Education can therefore do much to alter inherited mental and moral qualities. Can it be invoked to prevent the transmission of undesirable traits, and secure the good? Everything that we have at birth is a heritage from our ancestors. Can virtuous habits be transmitted? Can we secure virtues in our children by possessing them ourselves? Science sadly says, through her latest votaries, that we are scarcely more than passive transmitters of a nature we have received, and which we have no power to modify. It is only after exposure during several generations to changed conditions or habits, that any modification in the offspring ensues. The son of an old soldier learns his drill no more quickly than the son of an artisan. We must therefore come to the conclusion with Mr. Galton, that to a great extent our own embryos have sprung immediately from the embryos whence our parents were developed, and these from the embryos of their parents, and so on for ever. Hence we are still barbarians in our nature. We show it in a thousand ways. Children, who love to dig and play in the dirt, have inherited that instinct from untold generations of ancestors. Our remote forefathers were barbarians, who dug with their nails to get at the roots on which they lived. The delicately-reared child reverts to primeval habits. In like manner, the silk-haired, parlor-nurtured spaniel springs from the caressing arms of its mistress, to revel in the filth of the roadside. It is the breaking out of inherited instinct. TRANSMISSION OF DISEASE. Perhaps the most important part of the subject of inheritance, is that which remains for us to consider in relation to the transmission of disease, or of a predisposition to it.