all these marks of it I have spoken of, are congenital and hereditary.
Their names are always on some college catalogue or other. They break
out every generation or two in some learned labor which calls them up
after they seem to have died out. At last some newer name takes their
place, it maybe,--but you inquire a little and you find it is the blood
of the Edwardses or the Chauncys or the Ellerys or some of the old
historic scholars, disguised under the altered name of a female
descendant.

There probably is not an experienced instructor anywhere in our Northern
States who will not recognize at once the truth of this general
distinction. But the reader who has never been a teacher will very
probably object, that some of our most illustrious public men have come
direct from the homespun-clad class of the people,--and he may, perhaps,
even find a noted scholar or two whose parents were masters of the
English alphabet, but of no other.

It is not fair to pit a few chosen families against the great multitude
of those who are continually working their way up into the intellectual
classes. The results which are habitually reached by hereditary training
are occasionally brought about without it. There are natural filters as
well as artificial ones; and though the great rivers are commonly more or
less turbid, if you will look long enough, you may find a spring that
sparkles as no water does which drips through your apparatus of sands and
sponges. So there are families which refine themselves into intellectual
aptitude without having had much opportunity for intellectual
acquirements. A series of felicitous crosses develops an improved strain
of blood, and reaches its maximum perfection at last in the large
uncombed youth who goes to college and startles the hereditary
class-leaders by striding past them all. That is Nature's republicanism;