and sending them downward and backward, instead of favouring their advance. There exists two tendencies which we must recognize as permeating life of all kinds, and operating in every phase of existence: one tendency which seeks to tie the offspring to the inheritance to which it has fallen heir, which makes the child resemble its parent, and perpetuate the old stock in the new generation; the other, a tendency which seeks to pass away from this inheritance and its lines, which evolves new departures, alters the growth, advances or retards the race, and favours change in one direction or another. The individual is born into the world having his destiny outlined by inheritance, but subject, likewise, to those circumstances which may fill in the picture of his being, in hues and tones different from those of his parent's life. If it be true that the sour grapes eaten of old by the parents set the children's teeth on edge, it is no less true that alterations and change might modify the sourness, and bring sweeter things into the lot of the new race. But for this tendency to modify the fruits of inheritance, progress would be an impossibility. You can have no advance where each successive age slavishly repeats the ways of its predecessors. Human character is not stereotyped beyond possibility of alteration. Inheritance is, after all, the servant, not the master, of evolution. That is the true criterion of human advance which lakes what is good from our heritage, and uses it as the means to further progress. That is the equally certain condition for retrogression and decay where evolution finds the tendencies of evil and sorrow more ready to its hand than those of hope; and when the perpetuation of what is bad becomes intensified over