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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.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Heredity" Quotes from Famous Books



... properly this phase of the question. The fact, however, that my cases were culled from various sources and that the anomalous traits manifested by them were already present at an age when environment could hardly have had any lasting influence upon them, leads me to believe that it is heredity that is responsible for the major portion of this anomalous product. However, we shall leave this question to the decision of the practical eugenists. Personally I fully believe that we are dealing here with ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... 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 ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells

... fighting HIS little brother. His little brother is six, and he is twelve;—and of course he always knocks his little brother down. He cannot help it, he says. And he gets books on physiology and heredity, and he learns in them that whatever is IN the blood has got to come out somehow. He says that it's because Cain killed Abel that there are wars between nations;—if Cain and Abel had never quarrelled, there would never have been ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... this volume was to discuss the relations of modern discoveries concerning hormones or internal secretions to the question of the evolution of adaptations, and on the other hand to the results of recent investigations of Mendelian heredity and mutations. I have frequently found, from verbal or written references to my opinions, that the evidence on these questions and my own conclusions from that evidence were either imperfectly known or misunderstood. ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... reason why this part of the argument is given in Part I of the Essay of 1842 may be found in the Essay of 1844, where it is clear that the chapter on instinct is placed in Part I because the author thought it of importance to show that heredity and variation occur in mental attributes. The whole question is perhaps an instance of the sort of difficulty which made the author give up the division of his argument into two Parts when he wrote the Origin. As matters ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin

... proof that man is struggling to be better. They regard his transgression as a hopeful symptom of divine discontent. Many do see tragedy in it all, but the blame lies otherwhere than with the transgressor. Sin grows less terrible, but more hopeless, as they talk about heredity, as they transfer the responsibility from the criminal to his circumstances, his education, the conditions of his life or the state of society. Not a sentence of punishment but a vote of sympathy ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson

... of course, burdens to be imposed. He must, for instance, take my name. You cannot expect everything without some return. And I must go into all the circumstances of his life before I can accept him. He must be sound. I must know his heredity, how his parents and grandparents died, have the strictest inquiries made ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... and the land of "OM," anything like freedom of the human spirit is probably very rare and very difficult. The difference does not arise from any lesser stringency in the claims of Christianity to spiritual dominion, but rather, I imagine, from a deep-seated divergence in racial heredity. We Western Aryans have behind us the serene and splendid rationalisms of Greece and Rome. We are accustomed from childhood to the knowledge that our civilization was founded by two mighty aristocracies of intellect, to whom the religions of their ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer

... been selected for his latent capacities, his employer sets to work on him scientifically and according to the laws of physics, hygiene, conservation of energy, the laws of philosophy, human nature, heredity, psychology, and even metaphysics, teaches the man how to hold his hands, how to lift, how to sit down, how to rest, and how to breathe, so that three times as much work can be got out of him as he could get out of himself. A mind of the highest rank and, if necessary, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... malignant surroundings, and had been taught to regard the 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 ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren

... only have had something askew in my heredity, I know lots of authoresses who would have jumped at me. I can't do anything wildly adventurous in the Middle Ages or the Revolutionary period, because I'm so afraid; but I know that in the course of modern life I've always been ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... and wants to know you. Some day, it is written, I am sure, that you two shall meet. In some things you are much alike—in others utterly different, with the differences made by heredity and environment. ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey

... power to determine our acts also is a strong argument in favor of freedom. Nevertheless the subject is felt to have its difficulties and the arguments against free will taken from the causal sequences of natural events and the influence of heredity, environment and motive on the individual will are not ignored. Judah Halevi as well as Abraham Ibn Daud discuss these arguments in detail. But freedom comes out triumphant. It is even sought to reconcile the antinomy of freedom vs. ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik

... As heredity is a comparatively new word, it may be well to define it at the beginning of this paper. Webster says "It is the transmission of mental or physical characteristics or qualities from parent to offspring, the tendency of ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... of the Greeks among themselves made no great showing as to numbers compared to other wars, but they wiped out the most valuable people, the best blood, the most promising heredity on earth. This cost the world more than the killing of millions of barbarians. In two centuries there were born under the shadow of the Parthenon more men of genius than the Roman Empire had in its whole existence. Yet this empire included all the civilized ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

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

... (Hero-worship), 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

... 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... different people act under the same circumstances—and why; and if we watch the professional psychologist, we often find him working at just this problem. He tests a great number of individuals to see how they differ, and tries to discover on what factors their differences depend, how far on heredity, how far on environment. The "psychologist" in such a place as the children's court {3} is a specialist whose duty it is to test the delinquent children that are brought before the court, with the special object of measuring the intelligence of each individual child and of helping in other ways ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... man shifted his position and assumed a confidential tone and attitude: "Signor Diotti, jealousy is a more universal passion than love itself. Environment may develop our character, influence our tastes and even soften our features, but heredity determines the intensity of the two leading passions, love and jealousy. Mildred's mother was a beautiful woman, but consumed with an overpowering jealousy of her husband. It was because she loved him. The body-guard of jealousy—envy, malice and hatred—were not in her composition. When Mildred ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa

... heredity must be occult and complex. The offspring of a rebellious and disobedient child, is certainly entitled to no filial instincts; and some day the strain will tell, and you will overwhelm your mother with ingratitude, black as ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... the man was possessed of an idea which mastered him —a root-thought. David was at once conscious of a complex personality, of a man in whom two natures fought. He understood it. By instinct the man was a Mahdi, by heredity he was a voluptuary, that strange commingling of the religious and the evil found in so many criminals. In some far corner of his nature David felt something akin. The rebellion in his own blood against the fine instinct of his Quaker faith and upbringing made ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... they would have disquieted in my place any other nerve specialist. I recognised a symptom of the disease which, by the fatal laws of heredity, menaced my friend, and which had appeared to ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France

... so many combinations of factors that no one can tell; for it is during the period of adolescence that hereditary characteristics show themselves. Up to this time the child is a child of the race; during this period it becomes the offspring of its parents. And the factors of heredity—father, mother, ancestry—are mingling and clashing and combining with the factors of environment, and what the outcome is going to be, nobody knows, in specific cases, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd

... flowery paths, discovered by the French, which lead elsewhere, and I expect that in coming volumes it will appear that Hegel and Buckle, Vico and Ferrari, are scarcely better guides than Laurent or Littre. Fatalism and retribution, race and nationality, the test of success and of duration, heredity and the reign of the invincible dead, the widening circle, the emancipation of the individual, the gradual triumph of the soul over the body, of mind over matter, reason over will, knowledge over ignorance, truth over error, right over might, liberty over authority, the law of progress ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... said Jane. "I believe too much is made in these days of heredity, and by those who believe least in the Bible indications on the effect, forgetting ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... that a few months ago I was a guest at a dinner party at which men only were present, and that I was seated next to a very brilliant young American physician who was devoting himself especially to the study of Heredity. It being his hobby, he soon contrived to turn the conversation toward that topic, and, after a few general remarks, told several very startling stories illustrative of certain contentions which he advanced. Among others he related the case of a young Western farmer ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... the title of this chapter I have hesitated over mentioning here Albert C. White's The Irish Free State. Whether Ireland now should be numbered among the places to go or not is possibly a matter of heredity and sympathies; but at any rate, Ireland is unquestionably a place to read about. Shall we agree that the Irish Free State is one of the best places in the world to go in a book? Then Mr. White's book will ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... Fielding with unruffled complacency, 'that I aimed at an allegory rather than a pedantic narrative of facts. I was endeavouring to explain Clarice Le Mesurier on the fashionable principle of heredity.' ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason

... who later felt the magic of the world of books; and, still later, the need of expression, an expression which finally showed itself in a masterly interpretation of country life and experiences. The same heredity here, the same environment, the same opportunities—yet how different the result! The farmer has tended and gathered many a crop from the old place since they were boys, but has been blind and deaf to all that has there yielded ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus

... the appearance of this feeble old man, one would hardly think that he was once a rollicking scrapper, with ready fists like rawhide mallets. Old Dave dutifully gives full credit to the law of heredity. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration

... I 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. For ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... the square apartment was soon filled with six or eight men, and the noise was terrific. Curiosity increased. The fun was, as the comic papers say, fast and furious; and despite the ill-favored pleasantries passed by my own men and the inquisitive tea-shop keeper-as to peculiarities of heredity in certain noisy members of the crowd, a riot seemed inevitable. I stationed my two soldiers in the narrow doorway to defend the only entrance and entertain the uninitiated with stories of their prowess with the rifle and of the weapon's deadliness. Boys climbed like ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... his knees, and grabbed at his long stick where it lay on the ground. Again Warrigal snarled, less than a yard from Finn's ears, and her snarl was the snarl which announces a kill. It was not for others to kill where Finn led. And yet something—he could not tell what, since he knew nothing of heredity—something held the great Wolfhound's muscles relaxed; he could not take the leap which was wont to precede killing with him. Again Warrigal snarled. The man was rising to his feet. A great fear of being shamed was upon Finn. With that snarl in his ears advance ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... retention of the vitality of pollen, the period of receptivity, the seed production in hybrid fruits, and the time for and percentage of the germination of seeds. On all of these points we are accumulating considerable information that it is hoped may be of some practical value."—Journal of Heredity. ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... 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 ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various

... law. For all modern theories he had a withering contempt, his own simple creed being that in the beginning God made man a Tory squire. His quarrel with the social order was a purely private and particular one. In our modern mythology, Custom, Circumstance, and Heredity are the three Fates that weave the web of human life. Hardy did not wholly sympathise with this belief. He had too profound a respect for his own pedigree to lay his sins at his great-grandfather's door. As the nephew of a Tory squire, he was ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... what his parents had made him. Without being able to think it out in scientific terms he was able to expound the why of like. It was one of the inexorable rules of heredity. To his parents he owed everything and nothing. He reflected on this paradox until it became perfectly clear to him. They—his parents—had given him life, and that was all. He owed them thanks for that, or he would have owed them thanks if he considered ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer

... short, racial memories. Thus, when you and I, asleep or dozing off to sleep, fall through space and awake to sickening consciousness just before we strike, we are merely remembering what happened to our arboreal ancestors, and which has been stamped by cerebral changes into the heredity of the race. ...
— Before Adam • Jack London

... influence of heredity, there is the equally potent influence of example and tuition. It is a gigantic advantage to live on intimate terms with a first-rate, man, and have his care. Hamilcar not only gave the Carthagenians a great general ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... endured them; every one, in his opinion, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labor. He had been, he said, a fervent disciple of Saint-Simon, but that mistake must be attributed to his youth: modern society could have no other basis than heredity. An ardent Catholic, like all men from the Comtat, he went to the earliest morning masses, and thus concealed his piety. Like other philanthropists, he practised a sordid economy, and gave to the poor his time, ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... scientific speculation, he had the misfortune about this time to read in paper or magazine something on the subject of heredity, the idle verbiage of some half-informed scribbler. It set him anxiously thinking whether his son would develop the vices of the mother's mind, and from that day he read all the printed chatter regarding natural inheritance that he could lay his hands on. The ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... Creator, etc.,' to a generation that was more and more disposed to say something like this: 'We hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists; that all things looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by heredity and environment with no equal rights, but very unequal wrongs,' and so on. I do not believe that creed, left to itself, would ever have founded a state; and I am pretty certain that, left to itself, it would never have ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... laws of "adaptation" and "heredity," the basic principles of evolution, have been steadily at work, and slowly there has come about a differentiation of cell function, an apportionment among the different cells of the different ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton

... their more powerful neighbours. The very 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, ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson

... 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 type possible ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy

... sons 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 ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... daily contact with all sorts and conditions of men—broken-down gentlemen, English yokels, bush-hands, and the like. After all, the moulding of character by outward influences alone is not a work to be achieved in one generation, or what would become of the theory of heredity, upon which everything is supposed to depend, more or less, in our present scientific age? If these people strike the English reader, therefore, as differing in certain respects from those he is accustomed to meet in his daily walk through life, let him remember ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne

... so strong as to entitle them to be classed as "proofs." Among these may be mentioned the difference in tastes, talents, predispositions, etc., noticeable among children and adults, and which can scarcely be attributed to heredity. This same idea carries one to the consideration of the question of "youthful ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson

... Angel inherited lawless instincts from a vein of Indian blood in her ancestry. These two books were studies of certain medico-psychological problems. They preached Dr. Holmes's favorite doctrines of heredity and of the modified nature of moral responsibility by reason of transmitted tendencies which limit the freedom of the will. In Elsie Venner, in particular, the weirdly imaginative and speculative character of the leading motive suggests ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... adult life and their lives usually are burdensome and full of misery. They may be deformed or be continually afflicted with ulcers or other horrible manifestations of the disease. I will explain this more thoroughly when I speak of heredity. ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry

... sticks, is now a disastrous element in the life of the bird. Such of the cuckoos, therefore, as build the more perfect nests, or lay at shortest intervals, will have a distinct advantage over their less provident fellows, and the law of heredity will thus insure the continual survival of ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson

... present but an infinitesimal fraction of labor. It comprises those workers whose background has been fortunate enough, as to both heredity and environment, to allow of their main industrial interests centering around the doing of their particular job well for the sake of their industry as a whole, to which a sentiment of loyalty has been aroused and held. There is ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... of their heredity that they achieved this unholy concept. The breed will out and sometimes most fantastically. Thus in them did cursed Albion array herself a scheming wanton, a bold, cold-calculating, and artful hussy. After all, I do not know. But this I know: ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London

... to no trade or profession. A gathering of farmers or elders of the Church, or even Christy Minstrels, would, if thrown together for a sufficient period of time, and utterly dependent on one another for daily intercourse, fall into the places allotted to each by temperament and heredity. Each little community would own a wit and a butt; the sentimentalist and the cynic. The churl by nature would appear through some veneer of manner, if only to bring into relief the finer qualities of his fellows; lastly, and most surely, one other would jingle a merciful cap ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... pleasure of 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

... colonel, whose live-stock operations were based on heredity. "Jim's a scrub, I suppose; but he acts as if he might turn out to be ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick

... introduces us to great diversities of opinion, and to still greater differences in experience; and I fear that I shall leave the subject as indefinite as I find it. The scientist best versed in botany and the laws of heredity can here find a field that would tax his best skill for a lifetime, and yet a child may amuse himself with raising new kinds; and it would not be impossible that, through some lucky combination of nature, the latter might produce ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... for expecting such a development. Philosophically and morally, the raison d'etre of the doctrine of reincarnation is to explain the inequalities of life; and it does it not, as Jesus would do it, by means of the doctrine of heredity, but by the retributive power of Karma, or actions pursuing the soul through successive births and compelling it to reveal by its conditions and reflect by its experiences in each birth the experiences of the previous birth. The moral influence of such a doctrine is rendered all but impossible ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... picking it to pieces, floret after floret, with twitching fingers. She was deeply moved. "Well, consider his family history," she burst out at last, looking up at me with her large brown eyes as she reached the last petal. "Heredity counts.... And after such ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... of the name of Ford, who also served for the same period. The Fords were a long-lived family, as two of them held the office for 102 years. Cuthbert Bede mentions also the following remarkable instances of heredity: ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... she, looking out over the Plains, still saw with the eye of yesterday. Upon woman the artificial imprint of heredity is set more deeply than with man. The commands of society are wrought ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough

... in the ranks," he replied, "as ever came out of them. The law of heredity is almost as unreliable as the law of variation. Everything rises out of the mud, and ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly

... resumed. "But Spenski managed to keep us both without strain.... And then the war came along. A blight fell upon all workmanship in an hour. I had been on the military side of things from a boy, a matter of training and heredity. Of course, I would go. Spenski looked around the shop when I told him this. It was stricken, the machinery cranking down, the faces of the men white and troubled. 'I'll go, too,' said he.... I reminded him of her.... 'She wouldn't be interested in ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort

... No less remarkable than the persistency of the mores is their changeableness and variation. There is here an interesting parallel to heredity and variation in the organic world, even though the parallel has no significance. Variation in the mores is due to the fact that children do not perpetuate the mores just as they received them. The father dies, and the son whom he has educated, even if he continues the ritual and ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... humour is British by heredity; but he has caught something of the spirit of American humour by force of association. This puts him in a similar position to that in which I found myself once when I took the liberty of swimming across a rather large loch in ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock

... father's letter, didn't you? That fear's been implanted in your genes. It's part of the heredity of our people. It's rubbish. Bring ...
— Equation of Doom • Gerald Vance

... amateurs who have never seen it. Unconscious artists tracing with steady hand on a background of lacquer or of porcelain traditional designs learnt by heart, or transmitted to their brains by a process of heredity through thousands of years; automatic painters, whose storks are similar to those of M. Sucre, with the inevitable little rocks, or little butterflies eternally the same. The least of these illuminators, with his insignificant eyeless face, possesses at his fingers' ends the maximum ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti

... of it, as the price of it. The rights, advantages, capital, knowledge, and all other goods which we inherit from past generations have been won by the struggles and sufferings of past generations; and the fact that the race lives, though men die, and that the race can by heredity accumulate within some cycle its victories over Nature, is one of the facts which make civilization possible. The struggles of the race as a whole produce the possessions of the race as a whole. Something for nothing is not to be ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner

... thing to learn about the cause is that it is not a cause at all, but several causes. We are so well made that it takes a combination of circumstances to upset our equilibrium. In other words, a neurosis must be "over-determined." Heredity, faulty education, emotional shock, physical fatigue, have each at various times been blamed for a breakdown. As a matter of fact, it seems to take a number of ingredients to make a neurosis,—a little unstable inheritance plus a considerable amount of faulty upbringing, ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... Causes.—Heredity; it occurs in glass blowers, in musicians using wind instruments. It occurs also after ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... Heredity is not a law. The remote cause or belief 178:9 of disease is not dangerous because of its priority and the connection of past mortal thoughts with present. The predisposing cause and the exciting cause are ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... succeeded along the line in which we hope to succeed, whose success is measured as we hope to measure our own. Each leader of science and of intellectual life is in some degree the disciple of one who has planned and led before him. There is a heredity of intellect, a heredity of action, as subtle and as real as the heredity of the continuous germ-plasm. Ask the teacher who has helped mould your life, who in turn was his own master. In a very few generations you trace back your lineage to one ...
— Life's Enthusiasms • David Starr Jordan

... born in 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, ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter

... can go very deeply into questions of heredity. Of what follows here much was not known to Paul. Much that he did know he would have interpreted differently. The old well at Stone Ridge, for instance, had no place in his recital; and yet out of it sprang the history of ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote

... 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 clearness of ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson

... of our investigations to the questions that we have been asked to determine and summarize briefly: John Schrank, age 36 years, single, barkeeper and saloon keeper, and of limited educational opportunities, with insane heredity (see Exhibit 5), was born in Bavaria, on March 5, 1876, and came to this country twelve years later. Apparently he developed normally, but early in life showed a particular fondness for the study of the histories ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey

... imagination through all his blood. Most social arrangements, including marriage, seemed to have become open questions to him. Why, then, this tone towards Louie and her friends? Was it that, apart from the influence of heredity, the young fellow's moral perception at this time was not ethical at all, but aesthetic—a matter of taste, of the presence or absence of certain ideal ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... 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 ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda

... word of heredity in his day; but without so much of the word young Think-well had the whole of the thing. And as time went on, and the child became more and more the father of the man, it was seen and spoken of by all the neighbours who knew the house, how that their only ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte

... which, are indeed one great source of his attractiveness. Had he only been the thinker, the critic, the idealist we have been describing, he would never have touched our feeling as he now does; what makes him so interesting is that there was in him a fond of heredity, a temperament and disposition, which were perpetually reacting against the oppression of the intellect and its accumulations. In his hours of intellectual concentration he freed himself from all trammels of country or society, or even, as he insists, from ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Diderot. This error, however, was not essential to the general theory of the immeasurable power of social institutions over human character, and other thinkers did not fall into it. All alike, indeed, were blind to the factor of heredity. But the theory in its collective application contains a truth which nineteenth century critics, biassed by their studies in heredity, have been prone to overlook. The social inheritance of ideas and emotions to which the individual is submitted from infancy is more important ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... Palace, at the Ballad Concerts, at the Monday Popular Concerts, at Sir Charles Halle's Concerts, and at Bristol, Chester, Leeds, Birmingham, and other leading towns. As seems to have been the case with most well-dowered musicians, Madame Cole's talent owes something to heredity. Musical ability, greater or less, may at all events be traced back in her family for a considerable period. Madame Cole's first distinct success in public was gained with Mr. Theodore Thomas, during that gentleman's first "grand transcontinental tour ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes

... have more than a handful to meet—everything, every one that belongs to me, that touches me near or far; my family, my blood, my heredity, my traditions, my promises, my circumstances, my prejudices; my little past—such as it is; my great future—such as it has been supposed ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James

... either father or mother to make us understand how the child of these common people became at nine years of age a student of Plutarch, Tasso, and Voltaire, and a philosopher at the age of eleven. It requires a deeper law than that of heredity to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various

... looking at a leaf. But the life of civilization comes hard to him. He does not know the value of time, nor the value of money. It is hard for him to measure his days or to provide for the future, or to care for to-morrow. He has not the heredity of civilization and Christianity, hence missionary work sometimes seems slow in progress, but it is surely gaining upon this almost dead past of half a century. Thirteen Missionary Boards are now pressing forward to teach them the way and the ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various

... say this much to you: If you want to take a drink, take it and go about your business, but don't associate together for the purpose of drinking, whether for a night or for an hour. You will read, before the long life that is before you ends, a hundred ways of accounting for drunkards—heredity, inclination, regular drinking, grief, disappointed love, and all that sort of thing, but all put together they do not begin to approximate the cause I tell you of,—"associating together." It is the associating together of boys, the late nights, the early ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley

... accustomed to enormous sizes; superb heights; splendid distances; spacious vistas. That California does not produce an annual crop of megalo-maniacs is the best argument I know for the superiority of heredity over environment. ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin

... 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

... lets opportunities for self-help slip by unheeded. The world often exclaims over the failure of the sons of noted men to achieve great things, for, despite confusing evidence, men still have faith in biologic heredity. A too easy fortune saps ambition and relaxes energy; and thus rich men's sons, if not most carefully and wisely trained, are often made paupers in spirit, while the self-made fathers think their boys have better opportunities than they themselves enjoyed. The greater social ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... 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 ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... youth are plastic. Both body and mind are susceptible to surrounding influences. If the heredity is unfavorable it can be largely modified by favorable environments. If a child is born of unhealthy parents, but without any serious defect, and is intelligently cared for after birth, it will grow up to be healthy. On the other hand, a child born of healthy parents that is ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker

... superintendent. In the same year Elvira V. Ranier, M.D., of Oswego, was made superintendent of "Hygiene," also a new department. In 1884 these departments were united, Mrs. Niles still remaining superintendent. The next year Hygiene as a special work was discontinued. The Heredity work remained in charge of its first superintendent until 1888, when Sarah Morris, M.D., of Buffalo, had the work for one year. In 1889 the department of Health, which had been adopted in 1886, with Mrs. Mary G. Underhill, of Poughkeepsie, as its superintendent, was united with ...
— Two Decades - A History of the First Twenty Years' Work of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of the State of New York • Frances W. Graham and Georgeanna M. Gardenier

... lightly was I stirred when I slew Professor Haskell in the laboratory at the University of California. He was a man. I was a man. And there was a woman beautiful. Do you understand? She was a woman and I was a man and a lover, and all the heredity of love was mine up from the black and squalling jungle ere love was love and man ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... had indicated rather than expressed. Once or twice I had heard Corbeck speak of the fiery energy of his youth; but, save for the noble words of Margaret when she had spoken of Queen Tera's hope—which coming from his daughter made possible a belief that her power was in some sense due to heredity—I had seen no marked sign of it. But now his words, sweeping before them like a torrent all antagonistic thought, gave me a new idea of ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker

... seem that sheer mental force can be communicated, but that the higher qualities of the human spirit are not so readily transmitted; are, in fact, hardly transmissible, at any rate in quite the same degree. Not only are the examples of poetic heredity rare, but there are still fewer, certainly in the history of English literature, in which the son or the daughter has equalled the parent in ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams

... He thought of his father, whose expensive eccentricities had amused his fellow-countrymen at the cost of his fortune; his mother, for whom death had been a blessing; his grandparents and his uncles, in whom no man had found any good. But most of all he cursed himself, for whose follies even heredity might not wholly account. He recalled the school where he had made no friends, the University where he had taken no degree. Since he had left Oxford, his aimless, hopeless life, profligate, but dishonourable, perhaps, only by accident, had deprived even his title of ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton

... bullet more than for his life; I gave him every chance. But it had to be as it was. That was Fate. Now...." He paused and after a little went on in a more controlled voice. "Quaintly enough, if there's anything in the theory of heredity, David, my hands have been stained with no man's blood before to-night. Yet my forebears were a murderous lot.... Until this hour I never realised how swift and uncontrollable could be the ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance

... matter of fact, altogether of 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 study possessed him. This passion had manifestly been kindled, in the first ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis

... his boyhood, together with his mixed Cornish and Gallic heredity, were elements that very largely helped to create the whimsical character of George Borrow. We have now come to the time when the old soldier, with his pension of eight shillings a day, and his excellent and devoted wife, settled ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper

... ponder over the problem, wondering what Professor Fortescue would say to it. There appeared to be more here than mere heredity could account for. But science had never solved this problem; originality seemed always to enter upon its career, uncaused and unaccountable. It was ever a miraculous phenomenon. The Professor had always said so. Still the heritage was rich enough, in this case. Heredity might have ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... all the family cleverness, although as yet he had betrayed the possession of none of its higher gifts, paid the penalty of his mental patrimony. His brain was abnormally active, both through conditions of heredity and personal incitement; and the cerebral excitation necessarily produced resulted not infrequently in violent reaction, which took the form of protracted periods of melancholy. These attacks of melancholy had begun during ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... 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 ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... children, blind them, 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 will discover is ...
— Now We Are Three • Joe L. Hensley

... adventures are to the adventurous. Olive's father was Jack Agar, of the Agars of Lyme, and he married his cousin. If Mrs Simons had known all that must be implied in this statement she might have held forth at some length on the subject of heredity, and have traced the girl's dislike of boiled potatoes to her great-great-uncle's friendship with Lord Byron, and her longing for sunshine to a still more remote ancestress, lady-in-waiting to a princess at the court of Le ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton

... understanding of its merits. Yet they would not even consider it in a second reading. They are satisfied with their ignorance. They have nothing to learn. Hereditary legislators! There would be more propriety in hereditary professors of mathematics! Heredity is a great success with only one ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller

... Pennsylvania from Connecticut, and he had made some further exploration of his genealogical line. But this was more than his neighbors knew or cared to know about the family, until a son demonstrated possession of extraordinary qualities, which set the believers in heredity upon making investigation. The Grants are traced back through Pennsylvania to Connecticut, and from Connecticut to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where Matthew Grant lived in 1630. He is believed to have come from Scotland, where ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen

... as (1) constitutional and (2) absolute. In constitutional monarchies the ruler holds his position by heredity, but there exists also a constitution, which defines the distribution of powers among the branches that compose the government and fixes the limits of authority vested in each. The British constitution is partly written, as found ...
— Our Government: Local, State, and National: Idaho Edition • J.A. James

... the dewy grass under the apple-trees, giving way for almost the first time since his childhood to impulses which had hitherto, from his New England heredity, stiffened instead of relaxed his muscles of expression, felt as if he were being stung to death by ants. He was naturally a man of broad views, who felt the indignity of coping with such petty odds. "For God's sake, if I had to be done to death, why couldn't it have been for something?" ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman



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



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