LIKE TENDS TO BEGET LIKE 67 



impression is of the novelty and individuality of our children, 

 and only later do we recognise in those, who seemed so original, 

 a re-incarnation of our average selves. Oftener, perhaps, it 

 will be discovered that the resemblance in habits of mind and 

 body is purely mimetic, and that the idiosjoicrasies which were 

 really present, as buds at least, have been pruned off both for 

 good and for ill by the hook of criticism, or driven into latency 

 — ^like " sleeping-buds " — by mis-education or lack of appro- 

 priate stimulus. 



Like Tends to Beget Like. — The hereditary relation is such 

 that offspring are on the whole like their parents, but the degree 

 of this likeness varies within wide limits. Indeed, the discre- 

 pancies are often very conspicuous, and we can understand how 

 Prosper Lucas, one of the early students of inheritance (1847) — 

 careful and scholarly according to his lights — imagined a meta- 

 physical entity, which he called " I'inneite " and opposed to 

 " I'heredite," the former originating what is new, the latter con- 

 serving what is old. In modern phraseology, the occurrence 

 of variations is a fact of life so general that we must replace 

 the adage " Like begets like " with the more cautious statement 

 " Like tends to beget like." 



The popular adage " Like begets like " is often true as a 

 general statement. Offspring are often so Hke their parents 

 that even the scientific observer cannot tell one from the other. 

 In other words, the species " breeds true." But the more 

 intimate our acquaintance with organisms becomes, the more 

 plainly do we detect individual peculiarities, and we have to 

 change the adage to " Like tends to beget like." On the whole 

 it is true that average parents have average offspring, that 

 exceptional parents have exceptional offspring. Like tends to 

 beget like. Yet it is well known that, for instance as regards 

 stature, the tall do not always beget the tall, or the small the 

 smaU, so that we have to broaden the most general "fact of 

 inheritance" still further, and say that the average character 



