Excerpt from William Keith Brooks: A Sketch of His Life by Some of His Former Pupils and Associates Beaufort alive. The Heredity had meanwhile appeared and I am afraid Brooks was disappointed with the reception it met, for it was noticed with little more than formal sympathy. Looked at in the light of subsequent knowledge its purpose was indeed rather, as he says, to turn the attention Of others into this channel than to make an independent advance. In the preface he wrote: I have little hope that my views will be accepted in the form in which they are here presented, but I do hope that they may serve to bind together and to vitalize the mass of facts which we already possess and that they may thus incite and direct new experiments. That function he and his book did at length admirably perform for many, both in England and in America. 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.