white sheep, the frequent failure of the best efforts of parents and
teachers to make a fairly decent man out of a promising boy, have
led many to question whether, after all, the pains and effort are
worth while. We have come to question the wisdom of bothering about
"environment"; just as we sometimes question the existence of a
principle called "heredity." Every day some one asks the question,
"Do you believe in heredity?" And many times a day people discuss,
"Which is more important, heredity or environment?"

These are certainly _practical_ questions for parents, since
the answers we receive must influence our practice or conduct in
relation to the children. If we felt quite sure that heredity was
everything and environment nothing, we should reduce our school
appropriations and build larger jails and asylums, or we should
resign ourselves as best we could to letting "nature take her
course." On the other hand, if we felt sure that heredity was
nothing and environment everything, we should proceed at once to
double our school equipment, raise the teachers' salaries, convert
our penal institutions into reformatories and our armories into
recreation centres, and advance the age of compulsory education just
as far as we thought we could afford to.

Those who place the emphasis upon heredity, in the attempt to
discredit the value of thoughtful and painstaking control of the
environment of the developing child, usually remind us that a man
like Lincoln achieved power and distinction in spite of what we
would ordinarily consider serious obstacles to complete development,
whereas thousands of college graduates who have had all the
advantages that trained tutors and guarded surroundings can give
have developed into mediocre men and women--have even developed into