HEREDITY IN PHYSIOLOGY, IN MEDICINE, ETC. 343 



His father was a lawyer, and an insatiate reader of the 

 " Contrat social." Peter the Cruel, King of Castile, was the 

 son of Alphonso XL, who lived on bad terms with his wife. 

 Scandalous scenes of anger, jealousy, and violence, contin- 

 ually disturbed the royal household, and the issue of the in- 

 tercourse of the married pair was Peter the Cruel, a monster 

 of physical and moral ugliness. History shows us Raphael's 

 parents, both devoted to the art of painting. The wife, a 

 real Madonna, delighted in pious and graceful subjects. The 

 father, a vigorous dauber, preferred energy for his share. 



Ribot, in the remarkable work which he has just devoted 

 to heredity, examines the laws of that mysterious influence 

 which he judges to be a kind of habit, or perpetual memory. 

 These laws are little else than the ascertainment of the usual 

 directions in which the hereditary impulse acts. Sometimes 

 transmission passes from the father to the daughter, from 

 the mother to the son ; sometimes the child takes from both 

 its parents. Again, it often occurs that the child, instead of 

 being like its immediate parents, resembles one of its grand- 

 parents or some yet more remote ancestor, or some distant 

 member of a collateral branch of the family. This is what 

 is called atavism, or reversed heredity. 1 The latter fact 

 was well known to the ancients. Montaigne expresses his 

 wonder at it. " What a prodigy is it," he says, " that the 

 drop of seed from which we spring bears in itself not 



1 The singular phenomenon of alternating generations has been com- 

 pared with atavism. In 1818, Chamisso, in studying the biphora orsaZpow, 

 discovered that these creatures are alternately single or grouped. In the 

 first generation the biphora are found as chains, produced by gemmation ; 

 in the second they are single, produced by spores ; in the third we find 

 chains of biphora again, so that the son is never like its father, and 

 always like its grandfather. The researches of Saars and Steenstrup 

 have brought the fact to light that in some other creatures the cycle goes 

 through three generations, and that the likeness, instead of being one be- 

 tween the grandfather and grandson, is one between the great-grand- 

 father and the great-grandson. 



