“That is just what I think they ought to do, but unfortunately people have thought they must not talk of these things to young folks for fear it will make them bad instead of good.”
“Well, I guess that would depend upon the way they told it. Now they don’t tell it right, but leave the boys to be told in wrong ways, and that really does lead them to be bad. No one ever talked to me as you have to-night, and I am sure it makes me want to be better.”
“That ought to be the effect, and I believe it would be if boys were only ‘told right,’ as you say. But I have told you only half the story. Here is 15 another picture. These are called ova. One is an ovum, and these are the principle the mother gives to the future child. They are greatly magnified. It would take 240 of them lying side by side to make a row an inch long, so we say they are 1⁄240 of an inch in diameter, but tiny as they are, each ovum contains all the traits or talents that the mother gives to the child of which this particular ovum may form a part. Your mother is English, your father American. Their childhood and youth were spent thousands of miles apart, and yet both were working by the habits of their lives to create you in your peculiar traits and talents. Are you like your parents in any of their capabilities?”
“Yes, I am like mother in her love for music; you know she is a fine musician.”
“Yes, and in the cultivation of her own musical ability she made it easier for you to learn music; just as your father, in his study as an engineer, has given you a love for mathematics.”
“But my grandfather and great-grandfather were engineers, and I am going to be one, too.”
“It is true that you inherit from your grandparents, also, but it must be through your parents, and they may have changed the direction of the inheritance. This important fact you should know 16 and remember. You can change yourself by education so that the inheritance of your children may be quite changed. For example, if you know that you lack perseverance, you can, by constantly making a mighty effort to overcome this defect, compel yourself to persevere, and this would tend to give your children perseverance. So you see we need not despair because we have inherited faults from our ancestors, but we should determine all the more that we will not pass these defects on to later generations.”
“I guess that is what Dr. Brice meant when he said that mother’s good care of her health had overcome in us children to a great extent the tendency to consumption which is in her family. Nearly all my cousins on her side die with it, but when she was a little girl her father made her live out of doors all the time and she grew strong, and we none of us seem to have any tendency to consumption.”