young men. She comes to you for your fatherly advice and counsel. You know the records of the two young men. One is rich and rotten, the son of a corrupt politician. The other young man has good parents, a clean record, all the physical, mental and moral qualities of a real man, but he is poor. Nine times out of ten you would advise your daughter to take the fellow that is rich and rotten. You have good corn sense, good hog sense, good cow sense and good horse sense; but you have mighty poor son-in-law sense.”
When my audience ceased applauding, I held a book up before them and allowed it to represent a ten-acre field to be planted in corn. I assumed that all parts of the field were to have the same quality and richness of soil, uniform rain-fall and sunshine, and the corn to receive uniform cultivation. In this event the corn in all parts of the field would have the same environment. Then I said to my audience, “If there is nothing in heredity and you plant one-half of this field in corn selected from nubbins and the other in corn selected from large, shapely, full matured ears, the side of the field planted in nubbins will produce as fine corn as the other side.”
If there is nothing in heredity, and all in environment, the offspring from the vicious cow will be as docile and as safe as the offspring from the gentle cow; the offspring from the scrub horse with a six-minute record can be trained to trot as fast as the colt whose parents had a record of a mile in less than two minutes; and the children of the degenerate class will be as healthy and well developed, as intellectual and moral as the children of the normal parents.
Heredity in plant life.—There is operative in every sprig of grass, weed, vegetable, shrub, and tree two agencies—heredity and environment. What they are and what they are to be are wholly determined by these two agencies. In the past fifty and seventy-five years we have doubled the size, variety and quality of our vegetables and fruits. Nature gave us the wild rose, bearing a small bloom with five petals; nature and man have produced the large, shapely, fragrant, beautiful rose of the yard and garden, bearing from fifty to one hundred petals to the bloom. Nature gave us the knotty wild strawberry; nature and man have produced the large, luscious strawberry of the market and table. If our cultivated and highly developed vegetables and fruits had been left to the careless farmer, or in their wild state, with their heredity and environment without intelligent control, a Keifer pear and an Alberta peach would not have been produced in a million years.
Heredity in animal life.—In the last fifty and one hundred years intelligent man, through the wise control of heredity and environment, has produced the