THE HISTORY OF TWIN'S, ETC. 3^9 



resemblance frequeutly exists between twins of the same sex ; and 

 that, although the resemblance usually diminishes as they grow into 

 manhood and womanhood, some cases occur in which the resemblance 

 is lessened in a hardly perceptible degree. It must be borne in mind 

 that the divergence of development, when it occurs, need not be as- 

 cribed to the effect of different nurtures, but tliat it is quite possible 

 that it maybe due to the appearance of qualities inherited at birth, 

 tliough dormant, like gout, in early life. To this I shall recur. 



There is a curious feature in the character of the resemblance be- 

 tween twins, which has been alluded to by a few correspondents ; it 

 is well illustrated by the following quotations. A mother of twins 

 says : " There seemed to be a sort of interchangeable likeness in 

 expression, that often gave to each the effect of being more like his 

 brother than himself." Again, two twin brothers, writing to me, 

 after analyzing their points of resemblance, which are close and nu- 

 merous, and pointing out certain shades of difference, add : "These 

 seemed to have marked us through life, though for a while, when we 

 were first separated, the one to go to business, and the other to col- 

 lege, our respective characters were inverted ; we both think that at 

 that time we each ran into the character of the other. The j)roof of 

 this consists in our own recollections, in our correspondence by letter, 

 and in the views which we then took of matters in which we were 

 interested." In explanation of this apparent interchangeableness, we 

 must recollect that no character is simple, and that in twins who 

 stx'ongly resemble each other, every expression in the one may be 

 matched by a corresponding expression in the other, but it, does not 

 follow that the same expression should be the dominant one in both 

 cases. Kow, it is by their dominant expressions that we should dis- 

 tinguish between the twins ; consequently, when one twin has tempo- 

 rarily the expression which is the dominant one in his brother, he is 

 apt to be mistaken for him. There are also cases where the develop- 

 ment of the two twins is not ^tncilj pari i^assu ; they reach the same 

 goal at the same time, but not by identical stages. Thus : A is born 

 the larger, then B overtakes and surpasses A, and is in his turn over- 

 taken by A, the end being that the twins become closely alike. This 

 process would aid in giving an interchangeable likeness at certain 

 periods of their growth, and is undoubtedly due to nature more fre- 

 quently than to nurture. 



Among my tliirty-five detailed cases of close similarity, there are 

 no less than seven in which both twins suffered from some special 

 ailment or had some exceptional peculiarity. One twin writes that she 

 and her sister " have both the defect of not being able to come down- 

 stairs quickly, which, however, was not born with them, but came on 

 at the age of twenty." Another pair of twins have a slight congenital 

 ilexure of one of the joints of the little finger; it was inherited from 

 a grandmother, but neither parents, nor brothers, nor sisters, show the 



