350 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



least trace of it. In another case, one was born ruptared, and the 

 other became so at six months old. Two twins at the age of twenty- 

 thi*ee were attacked by toothache, and the same tooth had to be ex- 

 tracted in each case. There are curious and close corresj)ondences 

 mentioned in the falling off of the hair. Two cases are ilientioned of 

 death from the same disease ; one of which is very affecting. The 

 outline of the story was, that the twins were closely alike and singu- 

 larly attached, and had identical tastes ; they both obtained govern- 

 ment clerkships, and kept house together, when one sickened and died 

 of Bright's disease, and the other also sickened of the same disease 

 and died seven months later. 



In no less than nine out of the thirty-five cases does it appear that 

 both twins are apt to sicken at the same time. This implies so inti- 

 mate a constitutional resemblance, that it is proper to give some quo- 

 tations in evidence. Thus, the father of two twins says : " Their 

 general health is closely alike ; whenever one of them has an illness, 

 the other invariably has the same within a day or two, and they 

 usually recover in the same order. Such has been the case with 

 whooping-cough, chicken-pox, and measles ; also with slight bilious 

 attacks, which they have successively. Latterly, they have had a fe- 

 verish attack at the same time." Another parent of twins says : " If 

 any thing ails one of them, identical symptoms nearly always appear 

 in the other; this has been singularly visible in two instances during 

 the last two months. Thus, when in London, one fell ill with a violent 

 attack of dysentery, and within twenty-four hours the other had pre- 

 cisely the same symptoms." A medical man writes of twins with 

 whom he is well acquainted : " While I knew them, for a period of 

 two years, there was not the slightest tendency toward a difference in 

 body or mind ; external influences seemed powei'less to jDroduce any 

 dissimilarity." The mother of two other twins, after describing how 

 they were ill simultaneously up to the age of fifteen, adds that they 

 shed their first milk-teeth within a few hours of each other. 



Trousseau has a very remarkable case (in the chapter on asthma) 

 in his important work " Clinique Medicale." (In the edition of 1873, 

 it is in vol. ii., p. 473,) It was quoted at length in the original French, 

 in Mr. Darwin's " Variation under Domestication," vol, ii., p. 252. The 

 following is a translation : 



" I attended twin brothers so extraordinarily alike, that it was im- 

 possible for me to tell which was which without seeing them side by 

 side. But their physical likeness extended still deeper, for they had, 

 so to speak, a yet more remarkable pathological resemblance. Thus, 

 one of them, whom I saw at the ISTeothermes at Paris, suffering from 

 rheumatic ophthalmia, said to me, 'At this instant my brother must 

 be having an ophthalmia like mine;' and, as I had exclaimed against 

 such an assertion, he showed me a few days afterward a letter just 

 received by him from his brother, who was at that time at Vienna, 



