of them is a pamphlet which he published seventy-odd years ago entitled “Head-ication versus Hand-ication.”  It insists upon the importance of the latter in a manner that would reflect credit upon the strongest advocate of technical education to-day.  It ends with these words, “I thank God that in my youth I learned to make and mend shoes.”  Cobbett published it in the “Register” in 1833, remarking editorially, “One of the most valuable communications ever published in the ‘Register’ upon the subject, is that of our esteemed friend and correspondent in Scotland, Thomas Morrison, which appears in this issue.”  So it seems I come by my scribbling propensities by inheritance—­from both sides, for the Carnegies were also readers and thinkers.

My Grandfather Morrison was a born orator, a keen politician, and the head of the advanced wing of the radical party in the district—­a position which his son, my Uncle Bailie Morrison, occupied as his successor.  More than one well-known Scotsman in America has called upon me, to shake hands with “the grandson of Thomas Morrison.”  Mr. Farmer, president of the Cleveland and Pittsburgh Railroad Company, once said to me, “I owe all that I have of learning and culture to the influence of your grandfather”; and Ebenezer Henderson, author of the remarkable history of Dunfermline, stated that he largely owed his advancement in life to the fortunate fact that while a boy he entered my grandfather’s service.

I have not passed so far through life without receiving some compliments, but I think nothing of a complimentary character has ever pleased me so much as this from a writer in a Glasgow newspaper, who had been a listener to a speech on Home Rule in America which I delivered in Saint Andrew’s Hall.  The correspondent wrote that much was then being said in Scotland with regard to myself and family and especially my grandfather Thomas Morrison, and he went on to say, “Judge my surprise when I found in the grandson on the platform, in manner, gesture and appearance, a perfect facsimile of the Thomas Morrison of old.”

My surprising likeness to my grandfather, whom I do not remember to have ever seen, cannot be doubted, because I remember well upon my first return to Dunfermline in my twenty-seventh year, while sitting upon a sofa with my Uncle Bailie Morrison, that his big black eyes filled with tears.  He could not speak and rushed out of the room overcome.  Returning after a time he explained that something in me now and then flashed before him his father, who would instantly vanish but come back at intervals.  Some gesture it was, but what precisely he could not make out.  My mother continually noticed in me some of my grandfather’s peculiarities.  The doctrine of inherited tendencies is proved every day and hour, but how subtle is the law which transmits gesture, something as it were beyond the material body.  I was deeply impressed.