The Duty of the Present to Future Generations.—Darwin on Heredity.—Nature Inexorable.—The Mother’s Investment of Moulding Power.—The Father’s Important Part in the Transmission of Heredity.—The Parents Workers Together with God.—Parents must Reap What They Sow.—The Law and the Gospel of Heredity Contrasted.—The Children of Inebriates and Others.—Lessons from Reformatory Institutions.—The Outcast Margaret.—The Mother of Samson.—How a Child Became an Embodiment of “The Lady of the Lake.”—The Woman Who Desired to be the Mother of Governors.—Importance of this Study. “Often do the spirits of great events stride on before the events, And in to-day already walks to-morrow.” “It is not just as we take it, This mystical life of ours, Life’s harvest will yield as we make it A harvest of thorns or of flowers.” “Instead of thy fathers shall be thy children, whom thou mayest make princes in all the earth.” Francis Galton says: “I conclude that each generation has enormous powers over the natural gifts of those that follow, and maintain that it is a duty that we owe to humanity to investigate the range of that power, and to exercise it in a way that, without being unwise toward ourselves, shall be most advantageous to the future inhabitants of the earth.” Mr. Darwin maintains in his theory of pangenesis, that the gemmules of innumerable qualities, derived from ancestral sources, circulate in the blood and propagate themselves generation after generation still in the state of gemmules, but fail in developing themselves into cells, because other antagonistic gemmules are prepotent and overmaster them, in the struggle for points of attachment. Hence there is a vastly larger number of capabilities in every human being than ever find expression, and for every patent element there are countless latent ones. The character of a man is wholly formed through these gemmules that have succeeded in attaching themselves, the remainder that have been overpowered by their antagonists count for nothing. Again he says, “The average proportion of gemmules modified by individual variation under various conditions preceding birth clearly admits of being determined by observation, for the children will in the average, inherit the gemmules in the same proportion that they existed in their parents. It follows that the human race has a large control over its future forms of activity, far more than an individual has over his own; since the freedom of individuals is narrowly restricted by the cost in energy of exercising their wills.”