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Heredity   /hərˈɛdəti/   Listen
Heredity

noun
1.
The biological process whereby genetic factors are transmitted from one generation to the next.
2.
The total of inherited attributes.  Synonym: genetic endowment.






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"Heredity" Quotes from Famous Books



... I shall remove them at once. After all, Cosmo, we seem to know a good deal about them; and then we know some other things by heredity.' ...
— Alice Sit-By-The-Fire • J. M. Barrie

... soft, silvery laugh was music to the girl's heart. Yes, this was the ideal mother. Was there some secret quality in heredity, after all? ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... to-day is open to talent, for there is no heredity in finance, commerce, or industry. The Succession and Death Duties are wiping out those reserves by which old-fashioned banks and businesses warded off from themselves for two or three generations the result of hereditary incompetence. ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook

... repeated, that the tendency to perform them is completely organized in the nervous system before birth. The animal takes care of himself as soon as he begins to live. He has nothing to learn, and his career is a simple repetition of the careers of countless ancestors. With him heredity is everything, and his individual experience is ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske

... passed-away and Rufus Hallett, like another Stephen, had fallen on his knees beneath the missiles of the villagers to whom he was coming with relief. They had spent their lives in the service of others; he had spent his in his own. It was curious. If there was anything in heredity, he ought to have felt at least some faint impulse from their zeal; but he never had. He could not remember that he had ever done anything for any one. He could not remember that he had ever seen the need of it. It was curious. He mused on it—mused on the odd differences between one generation ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King

... The names of these gallant young men and women are found in practically every unit of service in the Great War as combatants, nurses and so on, all showing that blood tells, and that the theory of heredity can find in such cases ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth

... of time, we may, indeed, choose backwards. We may give our thoughts noble forefathers. Well begotten, well born our fancies must be; they shall be also well derived. We have a voice in decreeing our inheritance, and not our inheritance only, but our heredity. Our minds may trace upwards and follow their ways to the best well-heads of the arts. The very habit of our thoughts may be persuaded one way unawares by their antenatal history. Their companions must be lovely, but need be no lovelier ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell

... this relation is the strongest force that is raising medicine from the uncertain realm of an art to the safer sphere of an exact science. To many scientific minds it has even become evident that those most wonderful facts of life, heredity and character, must find their final explanation in the chemical composition of the components of life producing, germinal protoplasm: mere form and shape are no longer supreme but are relegated to their proper place as the housing only of the living ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson

... great-grandfather by an early Victorian artist, which fronted her as she ascended, in the gallery at the top of the staircase, all the more that she had been supposed from her childhood to be like the portrait. Brought up as she had been in the belief that family and heredity are the master forces of life, she resented this teasing association with the weak, silly fellow on the ill-balanced rocking-horse whose double chin, button nose, and receding forehead not even the evident flattery of the artist ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... of these men, Burke. It is not so much the terrible lives of the women whom they enslave; it is the disease which is scattered broadcast, and carried into the homes of working-men, to be handed to virtuous and unsuspecting wives, and by heredity to innocent children, visiting, as the Bible says, 'the iniquities of the fathers unto the third and ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball

... internal nature of the hybrids themselves. Breeders generally prefer to fertilize hybrids with the pollen of their parents. But this operation is to be considered as a new cross, and consequently is wholly excluded from our present discussion. Hence it follows that a clear insight into the heredity of hybrids may be expected only from scientific experiments. Furthermore some of the diversity observed as a result of ordinary crosses, may be due to the instability of the parents themselves or at least of one of them, since breeders ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries

... clearly interested. "Say, I'd like to hear about that!" he exclaimed. "You know, I'm rather great on heredity, Professor. What class did he come from then? Were his ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... more those who have any tendency to madness, may well be excused from having children; so too may they be excused whose poverty cannot keep a family; excused too is the inveterate drunkard, and all habitual criminals, by the principle of heredity, lest they transmit to posterity an evil bodily predisposition; but the healthy and the virtuous, men sound of mind and limb, of life unspotted, and in circumstances easy, the flower of the race,—none ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... its capacious depths an extraordinary collection of papers and manuscripts of all sorts, piled up in confusion and filling every shelf to overflowing. For more than thirty years the doctor had thrown into it every page he wrote, from brief notes to the complete texts of his great works on heredity. Thus it was that his searches here were not always easy. He rummaged patiently among the papers, and when he at last found the one he ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola

... each other and seemingly more influenced by some distant ancestor or by varying combinations of such influences than of those of the plant which actually produced the seed from which they were developed. Successful seed breeding can only be accomplished by taking advantage of these principles of heredity and variation, and by a wise use of them it is possible to produce seed which can be depended upon to produce plants of any ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy

... as well as Irish blood in her veins, and this heredity may have enabled her subconscious self to sense my locality and to realise my power and will to help ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates

... generation being condensation (I imagine him to mean that each generation is "condensed" to a small number of the best organized individuals.) test of highest organisation intelligible...My theory would give zest to recent and fossil comparative anatomy; it would lead to the study of instincts, heredity, and mind-heredity, whole ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... both agreed on the paucity of unit-characters that circulate in the heredity of the lesser races as compared with the immense variety of unit-characters in say the French, or ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... don't say you're in the least the same sort: all I allude to," Mr. Longdon returned, "is the miracle of the physical heredity. Nothing could be less like her than your manner and ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James

... is an article here on heredity that you must read. It has some reference to what ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... the new consciousness which came to Tolstoi a few years later, was born into existence through these terrible struggles and mental agonies, inevitable because of the very nature of his heredity and education and environment. Although as we know, he came of gentle-folk, there was much of the Russian peasant in Tolstoi's makeup. His organism, both as to physical and mental elements, was like ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... do away with the rights of the dead, and with heredity of power, whatever it may be, that inheritance which is unjust in all its gradations, for tradition takes root there, and it is an outrage on equality, against the order of labor. Labor is a great civic deed which all men and all women without exception must share ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse

... Jeffersonian democracy had done, to remove the infinitely less grievous restraints upon the white laborer thirty year before. It could never have been begun until individualism at the North had advanced so far that there was a reserve force of mind—ready to reject all the influences of heredity and custom upon thought. Outside of religion there was no force so strong at the North as the reverence for the Constitution; it was significant of the growth of individualism, as well as of the anti-slavery sentiment, that Garrison could safely begin his work with the declaration that the Constitution ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various

... theory Bushnell bitterly opposed. It made of religion a transcendental matter which belonged on the outside of life, a kind of miraculous epidemic. He repudiated the prevailing individualism. He anticipated much that is now being said concerning heredity, environment and subconsciousness. He revived the sense of the Church in which Puritanism had been so sadly lacking. The book is a classic, one of the rich treasures which the nineteenth century offers to ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... my ancestors had been selected for me by Greek philosophers, specialists in heredity, they could not have done better. I can not imagine a better woman than my mother. My childhood was ideal. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... sin certified by men's own consciences is the rock on which Pantheism must always strike and sink. A superficial view of human history and of human nature may try to explain away the fact of sin by shallow talk about 'heredity' and 'environment,' or about 'ignorance' and 'mistakes'; but after all such euphemistic attempts to rechristen the ugly thing by beguiling names, the fact remains, and conscience bears sometimes unwilling witness to its existence, that men do ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... a third reason." No smile in the blue eyes now, just an impassive blank. "I had a call a few days ago from an upper dog, by heredity. He offered me a thousand dollars cold not ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge

... Environment and heredity do not explain all the puzzle of any single man's mind and character, but they form co-efficients in the making of him which can be no longer disregarded. The chief point to be noticed in reference to Cavour is that he was the outcome of a mingling of race which was not only transmitted through ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... recognized laws of heredity there may be a survival from a more or less remote past phase. In the ordinary, average, or normal case, if the type has varied, the traits of the type are transmitted approximately as they have stood in the recent ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... 'fore I knewed what at," answered the abashed Jennie in a very small voice, unconsciously making further display of the force of her hopeless feminine heredity. But Peggy switched her small skirts in an ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess

... thought herself so elegant and stately, - her own physical beauty and natural grace barely saving her from becoming an object of absolute ridicule. And my father did not know how much his traditional power of heredity had already been undermined by the ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... austere nights of midnight oil, all the books I had read, all the wisdom I had gathered, went glimmering before the ape and tiger in me that crawled up from the abysm of my heredity, atavistic, competitive and brutal, lustful with strength and desire to ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... accept the theory of heredity deny the existence of the human soul as an entity separable from the gross physical organism. Consequently they do not discuss the question whether the individual soul existed in the past or will continue to exist after the death of the body. This kind of question does not disturb their ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda

... It never resulted in a tone a real musician's ear could endure, nevertheless during the latter part of the nineteenth century and even the early part of the twentieth it was made such an integral part of voice culture that it seemed to be incorporated in the law of heredity, and vocal students, even before they were commanded, would try to make a large cavity in the back of the throat. I believe however, that there is much less of this than formerly. Vocal teachers are beginning to see that the one important thing ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger

... to a considerable extent by old illustrations and paintings of Setters at work, in which they are invariably depicted as being very much like the old liver and white Spaniel, though of different colours. Doubt exists as to the other side of their heredity, but it does not necessarily follow that all those who first bred them used the same means. Of the theories put forward, that which carries the most presumptive evidence must go to the credit of the old Spanish Pointer. Where else could they inherit that wonderful scenting power, ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton

... tatting and making eyelet embroidery, when there were neighborhoods to be awakened and citizens to be made. That suits me fine, for I can't tat anyway. One of the girls tried to show me, but gave it up after three or four tries. She said some could learn, and some couldn't. It was heredity—or something. ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung

... influence for the origin of the cerebral condition of the boy may be attributed to heredity and to the father's ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... hours of their lives; the development of the right wrist being attributed in the same way to the number of glasses their fathers have lifted with it. This, if authenticated by scientific evidence, would be an interesting example of heredity, but I suspect it to be an exaggeration. The bar-room in the hotel at Kandy was certainly of vast dimensions, and was continuously packed to overflowing during the cricket week, and an unusual notice conspicuously displayed, asking "gentlemen to refrain from singing in the passages and ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton

... obeying a command and satisfying a caprice is begged for, when roses are strewn, and even necks put down in the path, one forgets to be humble; one forgets that in meekness alone lies the sole good; one confuses deserts with the hazards of heredity. ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett

... institutions—but also as differing from one another. Just as the different forms of bodily disease teach us a great deal about the body—its degree of strength, its forms of organization and function, its limitations, its heredity, the inter-connection of its parts, etc.—so mental diseases teach us much about the normal mind. This gives another sphere of information which constitutes "Abnormal Psychology" or ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... understand, which seems almost a better title to recognition on the part of the world. It didn't strike you so before? Well, it seems to me that choice has got more right to be respected than heredity or law. Moreover, Mme. de Lastaola," she continued in an insinuating voice, "that most rare and fascinating young woman is, as a friend like you cannot deny, outside legality altogether. Even in that she is an exceptional creature. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... body of Sheeta and shook himself after the manner of beasts that are entirely clothed with hair. Like many other of his traits and mannerisms this was the result of environment rather than heredity or reversion, and even though he was outwardly a man, the Englishman and the girl were both impressed with the naturalness of the act. It was as though Numa, emerging from a fight, had shaken himself to straighten his rumpled mane and coat, and yet, too, there was something uncanny about it ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... "environment," this patched up and piecemeal panorama of mad chaotic blunderings, which pushes us hither and thither; and they call it our "heredity," this confused and twisted amalgam of greeds and lusts and conscience-stricken reactions, which drives us backward and forward from within. But there is more in the lives of the most wretched of us than this ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... the responsibility is yours: you have passed on to her, as directly as heredity can do it, that love of business which has made you what you are. You have been denied a son, but whether you wish it or not your daughter naturally possesses those very business instincts which you would have been proud to recognize in ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt

... reaches a mean value considerably below the mean of the progeny that has usually been produced each year, and very greatly below the mean of that portion which has survived annually; and this will take place by the general law of heredity, and quite irrespective of any use or disuse of the part in question. Now, no observations have been adduced by Mr. Spencer or others, showing that the average amount of change supposed to be due to disuse is greater than that due to the law of regression ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... habit, the result of training and conviction. Every character is influenced by heredity, environment and education; but these apart, if every man were not to a great extent the architect of his own character, he would be a fatalist, an irresponsible creature of circumstances, which, even the ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon

... Physically considered, no men attain a better development than many tribes who inhabit the warmer regions of the globe. The inferiority of the inhabitants of these regions in intellectual power is more likely the result of race heredity than of temperature. ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb

... the laboriously acquired accomplishments of the present generation can be directly—and as such—handed down to our children. What we are to be and what we will do in this world was largely determined by the laws of heredity by the time we were well started on our development experience en-utero during the third or fourth week of our prenatal existence, as outlined in ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler

... stock. The Crawfords are a fine old family, and not one of them could be capable of crime. But Miss Lloyd is on the other side of the house, a niece of Mrs. Crawford; and I've heard that the Lloyd stock is not all that could be desired. There is a great deal in heredity, and she may not ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells

... Now, that was an innocent act on his part. He went out first, and of course had the choice of hats. As a rule I try to get out first myself. But I hold that it was an innocent, unconscious act, due, perhaps, to heredity. He was thinking about ecclesiastical matters, and when a man is in that condition of mind he will take anybody's hat. The result was that the whole afternoon I was under the influence of his clerical hat and could not tell a lie. Of course, he ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... had been already manifested by bringing her to the hospitable roof of the Huberts, where, under the shadow of the Cathedral, she could lead a life of submission, of purity, and of faith. She often heard within her soul the grumblings of heredity tendency to evil, and asked herself what would have become of her had she been left on her native soil. Without doubt she would have been bad; while here, in this blessed corner of the earth, she had grown up free from temptation, strong and healthy. Was it not grace that had given her ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola

... reason in the individual as a guide to conduct. He thought that, if each human being were free to act as he chose, he would be sure to act for the best; for, according to him, instincts do not exist. He makes no allowance for the influence of the past in forming the present, ignoring the laws of heredity. A man's character is formed by the nature of his surroundings. Virtue and vice are the result not of innate tendencies, but of external circumstances. When these are perfected, evil will necessarily disappear from the ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... but Brbara drives home the strange burden that all things must return to their primitive state. I do not add El abuelo, with its anti-determinist lesson, because Galds never was a determinist; he never believed, as did Zola, that the secrets of heredity can be laid bare by a set of rules worked out by the ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos

... Miss Carry courage. Her hand shook a little as she put down her teacup, for she was shy of taking the initiative. "I think I know what she would say. In our time it would probably have been different, on account of the family—and heredity; but Mabel is a modern girl. And a modern girl would say that she isn't to marry the father but the son. She loves him, so I'm certain she would never give him up. Therefore is it best ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant

... sought mine and he winked at me solemnly as I unostentatiously transferred the hat I was carrying to my right hand. Long training has largely counterbalanced heredity in my case, but I still pitch ball, play tennis and carve with my left hand. But Hotchkiss was too busy with his theories ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... ago we had a young woman under our care who had suffered with deafness and other troubles for years. She had tried dietetic treatments, "uric-acid-free" and otherwise, and had at last been told that her deafness was incurable, being due to heredity and deficiency in the organs of hearing. She was extremely thin when she came to us, but we did not measure her, nor analyse unclean excreta, nor ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various

... spirit take the substance wherewith to build its house from the parents. The carpenter cannot build a house of hard wood from spruce lumber and the spirit also must build a body which is like those from which the material was taken, but the theory of Heredity does not apply upon the moral plane, for it is a notorious fact, that in the rogues galleries of America and Europe there is no case where both father and son are represented. Thus the sons of criminals, though they have the tendencies to crime, keep out of the ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel

... evolutionists have learned the secret of mind-making by training dogs and other animals to certain habits, and giving time for heredity to transmit those habits, they being "immediately petrified in brain structure," why should we not go to work and bring about a millennial glory, at least by the third or fourth generation? If so much has been overcome as lies between man and the tadpole, with the tadpole ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various

... conservatism is something almost inexplicable. A friend who had campaigned with them told me that when they sacked a village their first quest was always for old iron, which they valued more than gold and silver, an estimation which can only be the heredity of an age when iron was the article of the highest utility, for now it is easy of acquisition everywhere about their country. They reckon their ancestry from the mother, and when my Cretan ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman

... education, as well as the freedom allowed her by law, behind the workingman. To this, another circumstance is added. Conditions, lasting through a long series of generations, finally grow into custom; heredity and education then cause such conditions to appear on both sides as "natural." Hence it comes that, even to-day, woman in particular, accepts her subordinate position as a matter of course. It is no easy matter to make her understand that that position ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... after their smashing experiences, cannot be really trustworthy. At any moment the rich may say, "Very well, then, we won't trust them," and bang the door in his face. On the basis of Mr. Blatchford's view of heredity and environment, the case for the aristocracy is quite overwhelming. If clean homes and clean air make clean souls, why not give the power (for the present at any rate) to those who undoubtedly have the clean air? If better ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... when great scientific discoveries are made, and more are promised. Geology once unsettled people about Genesis; but closer study of the Bible and of science has given truer views of both, and thinking people are as little troubled about geology now as about Copernican astronomy. At present heredity and psychology are dominating our minds—or, rather, theories as to both; for though beginnings have been made, the stage has not yet been reached of very wide or certain discovery. There is still a great deal of the soul unexplored and unmapped. No reasonable ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover

... to Darwin's theory that anything more should be assumed than the facts of heredity, variation, and unlimited multiplication; and the validity of the deductive reasoning as to the effect of the last (that is, of the struggle for existence which it involves) upon the varieties resulting from the operation ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley

... a happy blending of soul and mentality. Heredity seemed to have done its best for her. The Gaelic fire and the brilliance and irresponsibility of her misguided father seemed to have been balanced and tempered by the gentle woman soul of her mother. And through ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum

... and glory" of the Father. Man is born into the world a child of divinity—born for the purpose of development and perfection. Life is the great laboratory in which he works out his experiment of eternity. In potentiality, a God—in actuality, a creature of heredity, environment, and teaching. "Why do I teach?" To help someone else realize his divinity—to assist him to become all that he might become—to make of him what he might not ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion

... a people long crushed by oppression away from the degradations of slavery into a true and intelligent freedom, to teach those who have no inheritance of steady purpose to rise into new habits of thought and feeling, and away from the heredity of superstitions which were unrelated with morality, into a faith which really purifies the heart and the life, is not the work of a year, nor of fifty years. It means patient continuance in well doing. It means consecration, responsibility and self-sacrifice ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 42, No. 2, February 1888 • Various

... generally been believed that poets work by a sort of native inspiration, and that the poetic gift is a sort of heightening of temperament. But Sylvanus has proved—I think I may go so far as to say this—that this is all pure fancy, and what is worse, unsound fancy. It is all merely a matter of heredity, and the apparent accidents on which poetical expression depends can be analysed exactly and precisely into the most commonplace and simple elements. It is only a question of proportion. Now we who value ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson

... self-direction. Once the dominant political ideas depressed men into self-contempt; now they lift men into self-exaltation. New excuses for sin have aided in creating our mood of self-content. We know more than our fathers did about the effect of heredity and environment on character, and we see more clearly that some souls are not born but damned into the world. Criminals, in consequence, have come not to be so much condemned as pitied, their perversion of character is regarded not ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... "Disguises of Nature," inclines to the opinion that similar conditions of food and of surrounding circumstances have acted in some unknown way to produce the resemblances; and when the subject was discussed before the Entomological Society of London, a third objection was added—that heredity or the reversion to ancestral types of form and colouration, might have produced many ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... Nietzsche, et al., the great man is an autonomous product, a being without a peer, a demigod, "Uebermensch." He can be explained neither by heredity, nor by environment. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... be broadly stated that the Daika reformation, which formed the basis of this legislation, was a transition from the Japanese system of heredity to the Chinese system of morality. The penal law (ritsu), although its Chinese original has not survived for purposes of comparison, was undoubtedly copied from the work of the Tang legislators, the only modification being in degrees ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... glance, two facts strike us in the history of the kingship in France. It was in France that it adopted soonest and most persistently maintained its fundamental principle, heredity. In the other monarchical states of Europe—in England, in Germany, in Spain, and in Italy—divers principles, at one time election, and at another right of conquest, have been mingled with or substituted for the heredity of the throne; ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... Marquis of Montrose as the first of Scotsmen and the most heroic of martyrs. Although the senior of Claverhouse by two years, he had been with him at St. Andrew's University, and knew him well, but in spite of his heredity Pollock had ever carried a more open mind than Graham. During his university days he had heard the saint and scholar of the Covenant, Samuel Rutherford, who was principal and professor in the university and a most distinguished preacher of his day in Scotland. No ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren

... young lady, as she had a full right to be called if she cared for the definition, arrested all the local attention when she emerged into the summer-evening light with that diadem-and-sceptre bearing—many people for reasons of heredity discovering such graces only in those whose vestibules are lined with ancestral mail, forgetting that a bear may be taught to dance. While this air of hers lasted, even the inanimate objects in the street appeared ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... with women. The attack of pneumonia which came upon Parasang was not, the doctors told me, vicious enough to overthrow an ordinary man. I suppose it was merely that this man's life capital had run out. There is a great deal in heredity. Sometimes I think that each child is born with just such a capital and vitality, something which could be represented in figures if we knew how to do it; and that, though it is affected to an extent by ways of living, the amount ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo

... Charleston, South Carolina, December 28, 1829. He was older than his friend Hayne by twenty-three days. The law of heredity seems to find exemplification in his genius. The Timrods, a family of German descent, were long identified with the history of South Carolina. The poet's grandfather belonged to the German Fusiliers of Charleston, a volunteer company organized in 1775, after the battle of Lexington, ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter

... confronting the philosophic biologist is the construction of a theory of life which will harmonize the facts of individuality with the appearance of the continuity of all life, with the theory of progressive evolution, and with the facts of heredity and biparental reproduction." [Footnote: McDougall, Body and Mind, Footnote ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... when I put Peter into the pocket of my overcoat, and took him away to his new home. I had the greatest confidence in him, being a firm believer in the doctrine of heredity. His father I never knew, but his grandfather bore a great reputation for courage, as was indicated on his tombstone, the inscription on which ran ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... generations are not descended in the direct line from the generations contemporary with the quarryman who lost his as or his obol at this spot. All the circumstances seem to point to it: the Osmia of the quarries is an inveterate user of Snail-shells; so far as heredity is concerned, she knows nothing whatever of reeds. Well, we must place her in the presence of ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... name Hugh was an old ducal name, and there is little doubt that William de Avalon, Hugh's father, claimed kin with the princes of his land. He was a "flower of knighthood" in battles not now known. He was also by heredity of a pious mind. Hugh's mother, Anna, a lovely and wealthy lady, of what stock does not appear, was herself of saintly make. She "worshipped Christ in His limbs," by constantly washing the feet of lepers, filling these wretched outcasts with hope, reading to them and supplying their wants. She seems ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson

... where on earth people dig up names like Belinda Mary?" he mused. "Belinda Mary must be rather a weird little animal—the Lord forgive me for speaking so about my betters! If heredity counts for anything she ought to be something between a head waiter and a pack of cards. Have ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace

... of this matter is that scientific inquiry completely demonstrates the equal importance of the selection of fathers and of mothers. If our modern knowledge of heredity is to be admitted at all, it follows that the choice of women for motherhood is of the utmost moment for the future of mankind. Woman is half the race; and the leaders of the woman's movement must recognize the importance ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... to the emotion that she inherited from the king, her father, who was himself a marvel of fire and impetuosity. That the daughter of Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn should be a gentle, timid maiden would be to make heredity a farce. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... not mere machines of flesh and blood, set agoing by the accident of birth, and running for life on the narrow-gauge railway of Heredity. They are not "Machines in Fur and Feathers," as one naturalist once tried to make the world believe them to be. Some animals have more intelligence than some men; and some have far ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... ancestors were apes; let it be as free to ask whether our posterity shall be idiots, dwarfs, and knaves, and if not, by what change, if any, in our social institutions, such wretched results may be avoided. Gatton in his work on "Heredity," says our present civilization is growing too complicated for our best minds even to grasp, and to meet successfully the issues of the hour, humanity must be lifted up a few degrees, as speedily as possible. And where must this radical work begin? The best hope for the progress ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various

... criticism of Wuthering Heights is not to be surpassed or otherwise gainsaid) finds in it a tragedy of inherited evil. She thinks that Emily Bronte was greatly swayed by the doctrine of heredity. "'No use,' she seems to be saying, 'in waiting for the children of evil parents to grow, of their own will and unassisted, straight and noble. The very quality of their will is as inherited as their eyes and hair. Heathcliff is no fiend or goblin; ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair

... enemies of science make their most audacious attempts to discredit well-ascertained facts and conclusions. They tell their readers that those greater problems of the science (as they erroneously term them), such as the nature of variation among individuals, the laws of heredity, the nature of growth and reproduction, the peculiarities of sex, the characteristics of habits, instinct, and intelligence, and the meaning of life itself, have advanced very little beyond the standpoint of ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... and the widow, the worshipper and communicant in Rouen Cathedral, the builder of hospitals and monasteries, above all the friend of Lanfranc, was easily able to secure the voice of the Pope in favour of a claim based not on heredity, not on election, not on bequest, but made by virtue of the personal injury done to him by Harold, and made to avenge the insulted saints of Normandy by recalling pagan England into the fold of Rome. Never were the highest motives ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook

... he said, "began during the Second World War. Our scientists had long known that the same laws of heredity by which plants and animals had been bred held true with man, but they had been afraid to apply those laws to man because the religion of that day taught that men had souls and that human life was something too sacred to be supervised by science. But William III was a very ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... sings of the providence which guards the rear. "Goodness and mercy shall follow me!" God's grace comes between me and my yesterdays. It cuts off the heredity from the old Adam, and no far-off plague ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett

... climate changed. There was, for us, a world catastrophe, the cause and the details of which no one now knows very clearly. It sent our cities, our great civilizations into ruins. It left us with this barren waste with only occasional lowland fertile spots which now by heredity we rulers control, each to possess ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings

... at work in the youth which, together, saved him from the follies about him: first, and greater, the nobleness of character which was his by heredity; and, second, the high ideals formed in ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene

... make them deaf to all sound, cut away their voices. They are identical twins, facing the same environment, sharing the same heredity of blasted chromosomes. They will have intelligence and curiosity that increases as they mature. They will not be blinded by the senses—the easy way. The first thing they ...
— Now We Are Three • Joe L. Hensley

... that is, as far as I can. As I have shown she was always a woman of melancholy and religious temperament, qualities that seemed to grow upon her after her return to health. Certainly the religion did, for continually she was engaged in prayer, a development with which heredity may have had something to do, since after he became a reformed character and grew unsettled in his mind, her father followed the ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... Russell in Manitoba. The fact that in Canada less than 2% of the children sent out proved failures confirmed Barnardo's conviction that "if the children of the slums can be removed from their surroundings early enough, and can be kept sufficiently long under training, heredity counts for little, environment for almost everything." In 1899 the various institutions and organizations were legally incorporated under the title of "The National Association for the reclamation of Destitute Waif Children," but the institution has always ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... well informed" and immensely proud of her pretty daughter. She was not assertive and while I knew nothing of Mr. Habberton, she somehow conveyed the impression that if there was anything in Mendel's theory of the working of heredity she and her six daughters went a long way toward exemplifying it. There was a genuineness about the pair which was distinctly refreshing to Jack's jaded tastes in fashionable feminine fripperies and he fell into the conversation ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs

... sight everybody in Hillsboro realizes that Nelse "got it from his father," with a penetrating sense of the tragedy of heredity, quite as stimulating to self-control in the future as Ibsen is able to make us feel in "Ghosts." But we know something better than Ibsen, for Mrs. Pettingrew is no "Mrs. Alving." She is a plain, hard-featured ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... before it would have broken his heart, but the multiplicity of new interests had changed him entirely. As a matter of fact, he had been long ripe for the change, though he had not known it. As he had matured, the blood of his heredity had begun to clamor for its expression; ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester

... without the resources of the citybred parasite, and without money, his instinct, his longing, drew him irresistibly into the open; his heredity forced him toward the mountains, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... brought up like a wild thing! Sails a boat like an old tar! Swims like a fish! Motherless—old Billy, a poor shote, according to the gossip! The women have a sort of pitying contempt for him; the men keep their mouths shut, but you can fancy the training of this girl. I'm always interested in heredity and I'd like to know the girl's mother. Something ought to account for my ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock

... work in the way it did? The more original the mind, the more its investigation would repay us. But it must be self-investigation; what we want are facts of mind, mental data and in order to get them, we must investigate the living mind All the usual explanations of Temperament, Nature, Heredity, Education are the same difficulties, expressed in different words. Heredity is a circumstance, which has to be reckoned with, but we have to investigate, not circumstances, but results. Here is a living ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne

... disappeared over the fence which separated the plot of ground from the sidewalk. Advancing with many a stumble through the blasted rock and shale, he obtained ingress to an alleyway in the rear. Following this brought him to the back of the Somerset. Shirley had an obstinate grandfather, and heredity was strong upon him. It seemed a foolhardy attempt to scale the big structure, but he raised the ladder to the window-sill of the second story, climbing cautiously up to ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... pen." Thus runs one of McGuire Ellis's golden rules of journalism. Had his employer better comprehended, in those early days, the Ellisonian philosophy, perhaps the "Heredity" editorial might never have appeared. Now, as it lay before him in proof, it seemed but the natural ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... were tall, strong, and unusually dark: Tennyson, when abroad, was not taken for an Englishman; at home, strangers thought him "foreign." Most of the children had the temperament, and several of the sons had some of the accomplishments, of genius: whence derived by way of heredity is a question beyond conjecture, for the father's accomplishment was not unusual. As Walton says of the poet and the angler, they "were born to be so": ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... so flattering—for a minute! 'Bibbs couldn't help havin' business brains,' he says, 'bein' YOUR son. Don't be surprised,' he says—'don't be surprised at his makin' a success,' he says. 'He couldn't get over his heredity; he couldn't HELP bein' a business success—once you got him into it. It's in his blood. Yes, sir' he says, 'it doesn't need MUCH brains,' he says, 'an only third-rate brains, at that,' he says, 'but it does ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington

... the States of the Pope. He explained the reasons of this to his minister in a long letter, which was to serve as a basis for Champagny's report, and which, by its singular mixture of thoughts and principles, showed the historical heredity connecting the power of Napoleon with that of Charlemagne, united to the sovereign power which disposed in the name of conquest of territories and states, were confused in the imagination of the emperor, and made him look ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt

... naturally interests the man of science, and particularly the doctor, is the state of health and the morbid heredity of Mrs Piper. We have very insufficient information about these. I can find no circumstantial report on this important matter anywhere. Mrs Piper was rather seriously ill in 1890; a doctor attended her for several consecutive months; this gentleman was also present at a sitting ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage

... little. Believing in heredity in moderation I knew well how sea-life fashions a man outwardly and stamps his soul with the mark of a certain prosaic fitness—because a sailor is not an adventurer. I expressed no regret at missing Captain Anthony and we proceeded in silence till, ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad

... Causes.—Heredity. More frequent in males. Women sometimes suffer from them during pregnancy. Usually occurs between the ages of twenty-five and fifty. Sedentary life, irregular habits, high-grade wines and liquors, hot and highly seasoned and stimulating foods. Heavy lifting. Those who must ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... give his servants stinking meat to eat— surely this was reason enough to be indulgent to him? Besides, he was the chief sufferer from his failings, like a sick man from his sores. Instead of being led by boredom and some sort of misunderstanding to look for degeneracy, extinction, heredity, and other such incomprehensible things in each other, would they not do better to stoop a little lower and turn their hatred and anger where whole streets resounded with moanings from coarse ignorance, greed, scolding, impurity, ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... lives again, sometimes bringing with her plantation songs like "Voodoo-Bogey-Boo," quaintly musical. Many passages of the grandfather's conversations are preserved, in which we may detect the voice of the gifted granddaughter. But the influence of heredity is strong, more especially "down South." Also there are many charming stories redolent of the South. I was about to mention the page on which will be found the thrilling history of a mule aptly named "Satan." On reflection I won't spoil the reader's pleasure in unexpectedly ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various

... the Prince. "Has not the nation every right to know the opinions of its possible future King? Never shall it be said that Jingalo accepted me blindly under the dark cover of heredity." ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... but a trifle more sunshine than a month ago—and what influence a trifle where there is so much—and scarcely any difference of temperature, that Nature is insisting on obedience to one of her mighty laws—the law of heredity. Why, therefore, refrain from justifying the allusion? Why persist in declining the invitations of the hour? Far be it from me to do so. Is sufferance the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... man, and are partly what heredity and environment have made them. If nature had not imposed a ceiling, mere striving would make every man ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... Christian theory is that God does not apparently intend to cure the world by creating all men unselfish. People are born selfish, and the laws of nature and heredity seem to ordain that it shall be so. Indeed a certain selfishness seems to be inseparable from any desire to live. The force of asceticism and of Stoicism is that they both appeal to selfishness as a motive. They frankly say, "Happiness is your aim, personal ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson

... Mr. Chester warned Quin again and again that he was not supposed to emerge from the obscurity of his humble position as shipping clerk. But Quin was the descendant of a long line of missionaries whose duty it was to reform. The effect of his heredity and early environment was not only to increase his self-reliance and intensify his motive power, but to commit him to ideals as well. Once he recognized a condition as being capable of improvement, he could not rest until he ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

... the other way of thinking. But the fact that his great-grandmother, on the maternal side, was a daughter of The O'Sullivan Beare may have had a counteracting influence, if not through the physical channel of heredity, at least through the poet's imagination. As a child, Davis was delicate in health, sensitive, dreamy, awkward, and passed for a dunce. It was not until he had entered Trinity College that the passion for ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis

... I never have known," Doris was saying. "You see, I was afraid of heredity if I had to deal with it. Without knowing it I could be just to both children; give them the only possible opportunity to overcome handicaps. I thought they might reveal themselves—but so far they ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock

... won him, but as it is I am richly content with it. Perhaps I am the more content because in the case of Kitty Morrow I find a concession to reality more entire than the case of Mrs. Hunter. She is of the heredity from which you would expect her depravity; but Kitty Morrow, who lets herself go so recklessly, is, for all one knows, as well born and as well bred as those other Philadelphians. In my admiration of her, as a work of art, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... theory of the development of mind out of matter, and its conception of law, they are one and the same. The evolution differs from the identity philosophy mainly in its more scientific interpretation of the influence of heredity and the social environment. The one is undoubtedly an outgrowth from the other, while the audacious nights of speculation indulged in by Lewes rival anything attempted even ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... has been able to render the right of heredity common to all the children of one father, can it not render it equal for all his grandchildren ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... instance of a one-sided heredity. Alexis Delgrado evidently owed both mind and body to his mother. Looking at the Princess, one saw that such a son of such a father did not become ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy



Words linked to "Heredity" :   hereditary, hereditary pattern, inheritance, genetic endowment, property, organic process, biological process



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