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A portrait by Bonnat blinks nothing in the subject; its aim and accomplishment are the rendering of the character in a vivid fashion including the reproduction of cobalt cravats and creased trousers even which would have mightily embarrassed Van Dyck or Velasquez. Ribot reproduces Ribera often, but he deals with fewer externals, fewer effects, taken in the widest sense.
Frequently when you engage him in conversation in English and the question of business comes up, you find that he instinctively lapses into his mother tongue. I was talking one day with Monsieur Ribot, the French Minister of Finance, whose English is almost above reproach, and who maintained the integrity of his English through a long conversation.
Ribot, in his work on heredity, gives long lists of the world's most famous poets, artists, musicians, statesmen and soldiers, all showing the tendency of ability, in these various directions, to be transmitted from one generation to another.
Genius will occasionally rise a little above convention, but with an old convention immutability will be the rule. "Such," continues M. Ribot, "are the admitted characters of instinct." Yes; but are they not also the admitted characters of habitual actions that are due to memory? The latter often get the mastery, and only after several generations is training sure of victory.
You could see why Ribot was so excited about his laws of Heredity: "They it is that are real...." "To know a fact thoroughly is to know the quality and quantity of the laws that compose it ... facts are but appearances, laws the reality." There was Darwin's Origin of Species.
Let us now return to M. Ribot. In what conceivable way can we account for this, except on the supposition that the duckling knows perfectly well what it can, and what it cannot do with water, owing to its recollection of what it did when it was still one individuality with its parents, and hence, when it was a duckling before?
"Oh, I don't think I showed much decision just because I threw the cabbage out." "I referred to your taking my ear and learning, out of its due order in the thesis I was expounding, what manner of beast Ribot was. Ribot killed two of my best African geese. They are, however, still fit for food. I am going to beg your acceptance of one."
My last instance I take from M. Ribot, who writes: "Gratiolet, in his Anatomie Comparee du Systeme Nerveux, states that an old piece of wolf's skin, with the hair all worn away, when set before a little dog, threw the animal into convulsions of fear by the slight scent attaching to it.
But precisely because this is my conviction, I maintain that his innocence must be clearly established. No doubt he has the means of doing so. When he met Ribot, he told him he was on his way to see somebody at Brechy." "But suppose he never went there?" objected M. Seneschal. "Suppose he did not see anybody there? "Well, then, he would only have to tell the truth in court. And look!
I cannot, however, sufficiently express my obligations to M. Ribot. I cannot refrain from bringing forward a few more instances of what I think must be considered by every reader as hereditary memory. Sydney Smith writes: "Sir James Hall hatched some chickens in an oven.
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