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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: If he belong to the middle class, as soon as his schooling is over
he is set to learn his father's trade. To undertake to learn any
trade but his father's would strike the family as simply preposterous.
Why should he adopt another line of business? And, if he did, what
other business should he adopt? Is his father's occupation not
already there, a part of the existing order of things; and is he not
the son of his father and heir therefore of the paternal skill?
Not that such inherited aptness is recognized scientifically; it is
simply taken for granted instinctively. It is but a halfhearted
intuition, however, for the possibility of an inheritance from the
mother's side is as out of the question as if her severance from her
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