RECORD OF FAMILY FACULTIES. 



This book is designed for tliose who care to forecast the mental and 

 bodily faculties of their children, and to further the science of heredity. 



The natural gifts of each individual being inherited from his ancestry, 

 it is possible to foresee much of the latent capacities of a child in mind and 

 body, of the probabilities of his future health and longevity, and of his 

 tendencies to special forms of disease, by a knowledge of his ancestral 

 precedents. When the science of heredity shall have become more 

 advanced, the accuracy of such forecasts will doubtless improve ; in the 

 meantime we may rest assured that fewer blunders will be made in 

 rearing and educating children, under the guidance of a knowledge of 

 their family antecedents, than without it. 



Equal attention is directed in this book to the claims of every 

 ancestor in the same degree of kinship. No countenance is given to 

 the vanity that prompts most family historians to trace their pedigree 

 to some notable ancestor, and to pass the rest over in silence. It 

 demands an equal recognition of all the lines. We should remember 

 the insignificance of any single ancestor in a remote degree. In the 

 fourth generation backwards there are sixteen ancestors, from whom the 

 child receives on the average an equal inheritance. In the fifth there are 

 thirty-two. One ancestor who lived at the time of the Norman Conquest, 

 twenty-four generations back, contributes (on the supposition of no inter- 

 marriage of kinsfolk) less than one part in 16,000,000 to the constitution 

 of a man of the present day. 



I found when making photographic composites of persons of the 

 same race, that the change of one component in a group of eight 

 different portraits rarely made any appreciable difference in the compound 

 result. I infer that if the father, of a family of children collects all the 

 required data concerning his own parents and grandparents, and similarly 

 those concerning the parents and grandparents of his wife, then it is 

 probable in most cases that their children, being informed about all their 



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