HEREDITY ' MODIFIED BY ENVIRONMENT.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 9892, 19 January 1895, Page 6

HEREDITY ' MODIFIED BY ENVIRONMENT.

■ - Miss ■ Helen Gardner writes in tho Areka'on " Hero3ity," or rather " Environment," for that is the subject of the gecood instslraent: Miss Gardner asks the question, "Can heredity ba modified?" and in order to start fair sho says : — . ; "Let ns nnderstan.l that no environment ban create what is not within the individuality— that heredity has fixed this, but that environment does and mast sot as the one tremoadotts and vital power to develop or to control the inheritance whioh parents stump upon their children.' Notwithstanding, yoa are personally responsible for the trend, the added power and development yon give to much that yon inherit. Yon are personally responsible to the coming ' generation for the fight it will* have to make and' for the strength yon transmit to it to make that fight." — Miss Gardner refuses to attribute all the moral and physical disasters of the raoe to the fathers of the race, believing that tbo mothers have to answer for their;fnll Bhare of the vice, sorrow, and suffering of humanity . She says' that we do not want our country " covered with magnificently equipped hospitals, BBylnms, poor-houses, and prisons," but "intelligent and wise parentage whioh shall depopulate eleemosynary, charitable, and penal institutions."

"We' want men and women, who Bh»ll be well and intelligent andjreo and wise enough to see that not numbers bat quality in popnlation will solve the. questions that perplex the souls of men. We' want parents who are wide and selfcontrolled enough to refuse to oureo the, world -and their own. helpless children' with vitiated' lives, 'and who, if they oannot give whole, olean, fine children to tbe world will refuse to give It any."

And the writer anms up the whole matter thus : —

" Heredity and environment act and react upon eaoh other with the regularity and inevitability 'of night and day. Neither tells the whole story ; together they make up the sum of lifa ; and yet it is true that the' first half has been taken into account so little' in' the oonduct and soheme of human affairs that total ignorance of its very principle has, been looked; .upon as a oharrniqtr attribute of the young mothers upon whose weak or undeveloped shoulders rests tbe reaponsibility, the welfare, the shame or the glory, the very sanity and oapacity, of the generations that are to come ! "