BODILY CHARACTERISTICS. 47 



(vertical and transverse) is as a general rule due to 

 mere debility. Its subjects, generation after genera- 

 tion, frequently possess robust health while even the 

 most stiffly erect individuals, and their forerunners, 

 are often ailing. 



Throughout these pages it is taken for granted that 

 bodily organisation and character are, in the main, 

 matters of inheritance ; that we are human beings 

 because our parents were ; that we are what we are 

 mainly because they and their forerunners were what 

 they were. Many causes however may interfere 

 before birth with the purity of transmission ; after 

 birth, too, organisation, affecting subsequent cha- 

 racter, is frequently modified by ailment, accident, 

 and general surroundings. It may be remarked that, 

 while most children inherit something from both 

 parents, they usually take much more after one only. 

 It is worth noting, by the way, that two cousins may 

 be much alike, or totally unlike, according to the lines 

 of parentage they follow. Whatever may be the pro- 

 priety of marriage between cousins closely resembling 

 each other, no intensification of any family peculiarity 

 can follow the marriage of markedly unlike cousins 

 who take after the collateral rather than the direct 

 lines of parentage. The newspapers, not long ago, 

 contended that a child recently born of the two 

 grand-parents, Ibsen and Bjornsen, ought to be a 

 prodigy of genius : quite possibly there may be 

 little of either in his composition. 



