Excerpt from A Sketch of the Life of Caspar Wister, M.DTheories of heredity imply that the foundation of the natural characteristics of a man, structural and mental, is laid and gradually evolved by his ancestors very many decades before his birth and that a detailed record of the natural qualities of his lineal predecessors might enable an expert in the premises to foretell the general char acter, if not the fortune of the newly-born infant, as satisfactorily at least as any forecast made by astrologers of old. In the present state of our knowledge of the complex operations of heredity, this suggestion is manifestly premature, and not likely to be realized.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.