Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/681

 good and noble thoughts particularly among the young of the tempted classes; for all normal or abnormal action is derived from the thoughts, and as the thoughts are, so will the life be. In those particular localities where crime seeks to shelter and hide itself among numbers, the suggestions to wrong-doing are ever present, and the young, who as yet have the criminal instinct only latent, but who still must be regarded from the circumstances as incipient criminals, are the objects which offer the best promises of success in any effort for the reduction of crime. There is also this promising feature in reformatory efforts, that the moral emotions, once thoroughly awakened, do not satiate and deaden by exercise, like many pleasurable vices; they are not in their nature exhaustive, but strengthen by habit and prove more satisfying by use and perseverance, till they become almost automatic, when the individual may be considered practically safe.

It is well understood by natural scientists that in the noblest forms of animal life—such, for instance, as the thoroughbred horse—the likeness of parent and offspring is much more strongly marked than in lower forms of life. If we carry our investigations low enough—down to the border-land between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, such as some forms of marine life, hydro-zoöphytes, salpa, and medusæ we discover a curious law of unlikeness or alternation of forms, in which the immediate offspring are totally unlike their progenitors, but possess a resemblance to their ancestors one degree further removed, and this alternation goes on with an invariable tendency in the third generation to revert to the form of the first instead of assuming that of the second. This polymorphic tendency of low types of life is also illustrated in the vegetable world, for, while the higher classes retain, under all conditions, their normal form, whether planted in favorable or unfavorable soil (the oak is still an oak, the rose a rose), the germs of the simpler fungi develop surprising variations of form if placed on different kinds of decomposing matter; so far have these changes proceeded as to cause investigators to mistake them, not only for different species, but for different genera. It thus appears to be a law of nature that the nobler the production the more type-giving power it possesses, while the weaker and simpler are dominated by circumstances, and, if weak and low enough, do not necessarily impress their own image on their successors. May not this law apply to some extent to the human race? The nobler specimens of humanity will, we know, maintain their manhood and moral integrity under the most adverse circumstances, but, if we get down low enough in the human scale, shall we not find the fungi of the race, the weakest of our brothers, who have not moral stamina enough to hold their own elected way, but ever show themselves the creatures of circumstances, and are developed into just such moral or immoral characters as their environments suggest? These are the people whose course is always "in the direction of the least resistance," who, if they are placed