Excerpt from The Crystal Rood The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the children are set on edge. So ran a proverb of ancient Israel. The litera ture of the world impresses upon us the everlast ing truth - The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. Little attention is paid to the converse of the proposition. Virtue and vice are alike transmissible. Oak trees beget oak trees, and mulberry bushes, mulberry bushes. Forces of good and evil so act and react that sometimes. In one generation evil characteristics are dominant, and in a succeeding generation the ancient traits of virtue re-assert themselves. Dominants sometimes become recessives, and recessives give way to dominants. It is conceivable that there might be in man a virtue as strong and buoyant, as unconquerable and unsubmersible, as the physical characteristics of his race, like them remaining in sistently dominant through all the ages. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.