Tarbell[162] says, "So far from his later
career being unaccounted for in his origin and early history, it is as
fully accounted for as is the case of any man." The Lincoln family was
one of the best in America, and while Abraham's own father was an
eccentric person, he was yet a man of considerable force of character,
by no means the "poor white trash" which he is often represented to have
been. The Hanks family, to which the Emancipator's mother belonged, had
also maintained a high level of ability in every generation;
furthermore, Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, the parents of Abraham
Lincoln, were first cousins.
The more difficult cases, for the eugenist, are rather to be found in
such ancestries as those of Louis Pasteur and Michael Faraday.
Pasteur[163] might perhaps be justly considered the greatest man France
has ever produced; his father was a non-commissioned soldier who came of
a long line of tanners, while his mother's family had been gardeners for
generations. Faraday, who is worthy to be placed close to Charles
Darwin among eminent Englishmen, was the son of a blacksmith and a
farmer's daughter. Such pedigrees are striking; and yet, as Frederick
Adams Woods has remarked, they ought to strengthen rather than to weaken
one's belief in the force of heredity.
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