Hereditary descent : its laws and facts, illustrated and applied to the improvement of mankind : with hints to woman; including directions for forming matrimonial alliances so as to produce, in offspring, whatever physical, mental, or moral qualities may be desired : together with preventives of hereditary tendencies / by O.S. Fowler.

Orson S. Fowler

Date:: 1843

Credit: Hereditary descent : its laws and facts, illustrated and applied to the improvement of mankind : with hints to woman; including directions for forming matrimonial alliances so as to produce, in offspring, whatever physical, mental, or moral qualities may be desired : together with preventives of hereditary tendencies / by O.S. Fowler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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Tlie rel.itive influence of education and parcntitg'e conlrasleH. influence of education is greatly abridged by the original constitution of the person or thing to be educated. And in order to exert its full power, and shower down its richest blessings—and they are rich indeed—the original stock must be good ; and the better this stock, the more beneficial this education. The public sentiment is wrong in paying loo much attention, relatively, to education, and too little to the parentage, or the original stock. These things ought ye to liave done, but not to leave the other undone. Cultivate corn planted on a barren soil with ever so much assiduity, and the crop will be but meagre. The rich prairies of the west, need scarcely the least cultivation, yet yield abun- dantly ; an(f a rich soil with little culture, yields a much more plentiful harvest than a barren soil well cultivated. Many deplore their want of education, not knowing that innate sense, is infinitely superior to acquired learning. If a youth enter college a saphead, he comes out a leather- brains; but a man naturally talented, even if he cannot read, will be capable of managing a large business successfully, and exerting a powerful influence in society. Sound common sense, or what is the same thing, superior natural abilities, weighed in the balance with all that education can bestow, the former is gold, the latter feathers. Education with supe- rior natural abilities, works wonders by polishing the marble, but you must first hai-e the marble before it can be polished. All the education in the world cannot create talents, nor impart them when nature has not. Poeta nascitur, no7i Jit, a poet is born, not made one by education, embodies the experience of all nations and all ages. The sentiment, *' 'T is education forms the common mind, is untrue, unless we lay the stress on common mind, and allow that in cases where ])arentage has given no special bias to the mind, but left it common place, education then gives it various directions. But education can never create genius. It cannot create any thing; above all, it cannot make a constitutional saphead a Shakspeare or a Milton. Elihu Burritt, the learned blacksmith, in his public lectures, reverses the old adage, Poeta 7iascitur non Jit, and says,

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