and kept more homogeneous than on the continent, where all of a noble’s sons and daughters are themselves noble.  This stirring or levelling process may be effected in many ways and along many lines, but in no way better than by popular education, as we have well understood in this country.  This is why our educational system is a bulwark of our form of government, and this is why the public library—­the only continuous feature of that system, exercising its influence from earliest childhood to most advanced age—­is worth to the community whatever it may cost in its most improved form.  There are enough influences at work to segregate classes in our country, and they come to us ready-made from other countries; we may be thankful that the public library is helping to make Americans of our immigrants and to make uniformly cultivated and well-informed Americans of us all.

Another interesting light on the functions of the printed page, and hence of the library, is shown by the recent biological theory that connects the phenomena of heredity with those of habit and memory.  The inheritance of ancestral characteristics, according to this view, may be described as racial memory.  To illustrate, we may take an interesting study of a family of Danish athletes, recently made and published in France.  The members of this family, adults and children, men and women, have all been gymnasts for over three hundred years—­no one of them would think of adopting any other means of gaining a livelihood.  It seems certain to the scientific men who have been conducting the investigation, that not only the physical ability to become an acrobat, but also the mental qualities that contribute so much to success in this occupation—­pride in the acrobatic pre-eminence of the family, courage, love of applause, and so on—­have been handed down from one generation to another, and that it has cost each generation less time and effort to acquire its skill than its predecessor.  In other words, we are told, members of this family are born with certain predispositions—­latent ancestral memories, we may say, of the occupations of previous generations.  To make these effective, it is necessary only to awaken them, and this may be done simply by the sight of other persons performing gymnastic feats.  These they learn in weeks, where others, without such ancestral memories, would require months or years.

Evidently this may be applied much more widely than to mere physical skill.  Few of us can boast of gymnastic ancestry, but all of us have inherited predispositions and have ancestral memories that make it easier for us to learn certain things and to choose certain courses than we should find it without them.  Some of these are good; some bad.  Some are useful; some injurious.  It is necessary only to awaken them to set going a train of consequences; if not awakened, they may remain permanently dormant.  How important, therefore, are the suggestions that may serve as such awakeners; how necessary to bring forward the useful, and to banish the injurious ones!