As a physician and a man of science, Dr. Holmes added abundant knowledge of the new sort; and apt, unexpected bits of science made popular, analogies and illustrations afforded by science are frequent in his works.  Thus, in “Elsie Venner,” and in “The Guardian Angel,” “heredity” is his theme.  He is always brooding over the thought that each of us is so much made up of earlier people, our ancestors, who bequeath to us so many disagreeable things—­vice, madness, disease, emotions, tricks of gesture.  No doubt these things are bequeathed, but all in such new proportions and relations, that each of us is himself and nobody else, and therefore had better make up his mind to be himself, and for himself responsible.

All this doctrine of heredity, still so dimly understood, Dr. Holmes derives from science.  But, in passing through his mind, that of a New Englander conscious of New England’s past, science takes a stain of romance and superstition.  Elsie Venner, through an experience of her mother’s, inherits the nature of the serpent, so the novel is as far from common life as the tale of “Melusine,” or any other echidna.  The fantasy has its setting in a commonplace New England environment, and thus recalls a Hawthorne less subtle and concentrated, but much more humorous.  The heroine of the “Guardian Angel,” again, exposes a character in layers, as it were, each stratum of consciousness being inherited from a different ancestor—­among others, a red Indian.  She has many personalities, like the queer women we read about in French treatises on hysterics and nervous diseases.  These stories are “fairy tales of science,” by a man of science, who is also a humourist, and has a touch of the poet, and of the old fathers who were afraid of witches.  The “blend” is singular enough, and not without its originality of fascination.

Though a man of science Dr. Holmes apparently took an imaginative pleasure in all shapes of superstition that he could muster.  I must quote a passage from “The Professor at the Breakfast Table,” as peculiarly illustrative of his method, and his ways of half accepting the abnormally romantic—­accepting just enough for pleasure, like Sir Walter Scott.  Connected with the extract is a curious anecdote.

“I think I am a little superstitious.  There were two things, when I was a boy, that diabolised my imagination,—­I mean, that gave me a distinct apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled round the neighbourhood where I was born and bred.  The first was a series of marks called the ‘Devil’s footsteps.’  These were patches of sand in the pastures, where no grass grew, where even the low-bush blackberry, the ‘dewberry,’ as our Southern neighbours call it, in prettier and more Shakespearian language, did not spread its clinging creepers, where even the pale, dry, sadly-sweet ‘everlasting’ could not grow, but all was bare and blasted.  The second was a mark in one of the public buildings