Excerpt from Character Training in Childhood And yet it is most important that parents, actual and prospective, should understand the law of heredity, in its main aspects. It is vitally important that they should invite all the good fairies to preside over the birth of their child, and that they should not nu wittingly, like the royal pair in the fairy tale, bring a curse on their baby's innocent head. In the first place, since the child is formed from the germ cells of father and mother, and since we know that each human being is born with his quota of germ cells and does not add to their number, during his life, it follows that the child cannot inherit any trait which was acquired by either parent. He can inherit only such traits as were, in turn, inherited by his parents from their parents. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.