HEREDITARY TRAITS. 



33 



father, or if the present champion sculler (mak- 

 ing allowances for the change introduced by the 

 sliding seat) rows very much like his father and 

 his uncle. 



Some peculiarities, such as stammering, lisp- 

 ing, babbling, and the like, are not easily refer- 

 able to any special class of hereditary traits, be- 

 cause it is not clear how far they are to be re- 

 garded as depending on bodily or how far on 

 mental peculiarities. It might seem obvious that 

 stammering was in most cases uncontrollable by 

 the will, and babbling might seem as certainly 

 controllable. Yet there are cases which throw 

 doubt on either conclusion. Thus, Dr. Lucas 

 tells us of a servant-maid whose loquacity was 

 apparently quite uncontrollable. She would talk 

 to people till they were ready to faint ; and, if 

 there were no human being to listen to her, she 

 would talk to animals and inanimate objects, or 

 would talk aloud to herself. She had to be dis- 

 charged. " But," she said to her master, " I 

 am not to blame ; it all comes from my father. 

 He had the same fault, and it drove my mother 

 to distraction ; and his father was just the same." 

 Stammering has been transmitted through as 

 many as five generations. The same has been 

 noticed of peculiarities of vision. The Mont- 

 morency look, a sort of half squint, affected 

 nearly all the members of the Montmorency fam- 

 ily. The peculiarity called Daltonism, an inabil- 

 ity to distinguish between certain colors of the 

 spectrum, was not so named, as is often assert- 

 ed, merely because the distinguished chemist Dal- 

 ton was affected by it, but because three members 

 of the same family were similarly affected. Deaf- 

 ness and blindness are not commonly hereditary 

 where the parents have lost sight or hearing 

 either by accident or through illness, even though 

 the illness or accident occur during infancy ; but 

 persons born either blind or deaf frequently, if 

 not commonly, transmit the defect to some at 

 least among their offspring. Similar remarks 

 apply to deaf-muteness. 



The senses of taste and smell must also be in- 

 cluded in the list of those which are affected by 

 transmitted peculiarities. If we include the crav- 

 ing for liquor among such peculiarities, we might 

 at once cite a long list of cases ; but this craving 

 must be regarded as nervo-psychical, the sense of 

 taste having in reality very little to do with it. 

 It is doubtful how the following hideous instance 

 should be classed. It is related by Dr. Lucas. 

 " A man in Scotland had an irresistible desire to 

 eat human flesh. He had a daughter. Although 

 removed from her father and mother, who were 

 75 



both sent to the stake before she was a year old, 

 and although brought up among respectable peo- 

 ple, this girl, like her father, yielded to the hor- 

 rible craving for human flesh." He must be an 

 ardent student of physiological science who re- 

 grets that at this stage circumstances intervened 

 which prevented^ the world from ascertaining 

 whether the peculiarity would have descended to 

 the third and fourth generations. 



Among the strangest cases of hereditary trans- 

 mission are those relating to handwriting. Dar- 

 win cites several curious instances in his " Varia- 

 tion of Plants and Animals under Domestication." 

 " On what a curious combination of corporeal 

 structure, mental character, and training," he re- 

 marks, " must handwriting depend. Yet every 

 one must have noted the occasional close similar- 

 ity of the handwriting in father and son, even al- 

 though the father had not taught the son. A 

 great collector of franks assured me that in his 

 collection there were several franks of father and 

 son hardly distinguishable except by their dates." 

 Hofacker, in Germany, remarks on the inheritance 

 of handwriting; and it has been even asserted 

 that English boys, when taught to write in France, 

 naturally cling to their English manner of writing. 

 Dr. Carpenter mentions the following instance as 

 having occurred in his own family, as showing 

 that the character of the handwriting is indepen- 

 dent of the special teaching which the right hand 

 receives in this art : "A gentleman who emigrated 

 to the United States, and settled in the back- 

 woods, before the end of last century, was accus- 

 tomed from time to time to write long letters to 

 his sister in England, giving an account of his 

 family affairs. Having lost his right arm by an 

 accident, the correspondence was temporarily kept 

 up by one or other of his children; but in the 

 course of a few months he learned to write with 

 his left hand, and, before long, the handwriting 

 of the letters thus written came to be indistin- 

 guishable from that of his former letters." 



We had occasion, two or three years ago, to 

 consider in these pages, in an article on " Strange 

 Mental Feats," the question of inherited mental 

 qualities and artistic habits, and would refer the 

 reader for some remarkable instances of trans- 

 mitted powers to that article. 1 Galton, in his 

 work on " Hereditary Genius," and Ribot, in his 

 treatise on " Heredity," have collected many facts 

 bearing on this interesting question. Both writ- 

 ers show a decided bias in favor of a view which 

 would give to heredity a rather too important 

 position among the factors of genius. Cases are 

 1 See Cornkill Magazine for August, 1875. 



