the younger sons of its nobility, so that the whole body politic is
continually stirred 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.