SCIENCE 



NEW YORK, MARCH 18, 1892. 



THE PERSISTENCY OF FAMILY TRAITS. 



Not long' ago we met a young friend, a bright, charming 

 fellow, who said he was a student of ancestry. Having a 

 weakness in that direction ourselves, we soon became en- 

 gaged in conversation upon subjects of mutual interest until 

 we remarked upon the extraordinary persistency of peculiar 

 traits in members of the same family for long periods of 

 time. To our astonishment he immediately informed us 

 that the notion that there is such a thing as " family traits" 

 had been consigned by all the leading genealogists to the 

 realm of myths, and that there is positively no such thing to 

 be met with in human experience. He proceeded to state 

 that old people with active imaginations and defective sight 

 and hearing thought they saw in their descendants the pe- 

 culiar traits that in youth they had noted in their ancestors. 

 Take from this, he says, the element of imagination, and 

 there remains nothing but the recurrence of the traits of 

 character common to humanity, and that once in a brief in- 

 terval of time are emphasized in individuals. 



He then produced a genealogical chart that showed the 

 ancestors of A. B. through nine generations. A. B. was a 

 direct descendant from L. B., who came from England early 

 in the seventeenth century, about 250 years ago. The chart was 

 of the usual semicircular form, with A. B. in the centre, and 

 arranged in concentric semicircles, each semicircle devoted 

 to a generation, with the right quadrant devoted to the an- 

 cestry on one side and the left quadrant devoted to those on 

 the other. Of course, if such a chart was complete, as they 

 very seldom are, the second semicircle would contain the 

 names of two parents, the third of four grandparents, the 

 fourth of eight great-grandparents, the fifth of sixteen, the 

 sixth of thirty-two, the seventh of sixty-four, the eighth of 

 one hundred and twenty-eight, and the ninth of two hun- 

 dred and fifty-six. The whole number is five hundred and 

 eleven individual ancestors of both sexes in nine generations. 

 Assuming that no marriages took place between parties of 

 even remote relationship, which is not likely to occur when 

 the nine generations remain locally in the same neighbor- 

 hood, the chart would show five hundred and ten ancestors, 

 among which the direct line of B. comprised nine individu- 

 als, and occupied a perpendicular line in the centre of the 

 chart. 



" Now," says my friend triumphantly, "do you suppose 

 that that line, mixed with nearly five hundred other lines, 

 will preserve anything originally characteristic of it? The 

 idea is preposterous." He continued further, "You will ad- 

 mit that ancestry consists of two elements, heredity and en- 

 vironment. In this case the environment has been the gen- 

 eral conditions of New England farm and village life — 

 practically the same; we can therefore leave that out. Now, 

 heredity remains; do you suppose that anything peculiar re- 

 mains in A. B. of any one of the two hundred and fifty an- 

 cestors from whom he is descended in the eighth generation 

 from his own?" We answered, most emphatically, "Yes; 

 and they would chiefly lie in the perpendicular line of B." 



To this declaration he dissented with equal emphasis, and 

 appealed to the chart to prove it. We admitted that, as a 

 geometrical demonstration, the chart was unanswerable, and 

 urged without avail the fallacy of submitting a problem in 

 biology and psychology to mathematical proof. The chart 

 was, he assured us, the genealogist's compass and pole star, 

 from which there was no appeal. 



Further conversation led to numerous citations of exam- 

 ples from our own knowledge and experience, which has 

 been widely extended for many years among the descendants 

 of John Doe. These examples, he assured us, were all mere 

 coincidences that would cease to be examples beyond the 

 .range of the present generation; that, generally speaking, 

 no man's knowledge extended beyond his grandfather, and 

 that so-called family trails were eliminated by ignoring the 

 great mass of dissimilars, and exaggerating the importance 

 of the few similars. Finally, he challenged us to show that 

 our examples proved anything beyond the observation of a 

 few coincidences. 



The problem briefly stated is this: Do Ipersons bearing the 

 same surname and remotely of the same family exhibit traits 

 of character that are common, or in any sense to be consid- 

 ered as "family traits?" The facts within our observation 

 and knowledge we believe to be susceptible of explanation 

 upon a purely scientific basis of well-established principles, 

 without any recourse to either imagination or chance coinci- 

 dence. John Doe settled in one of the New England colo- 

 nies about 250 years ago. The name is common among the 

 middle-class English and is very old, one of the name hav- 

 ing held a high ecclesiastical position in the thirteenth cen- 

 tury, and others appearing among the lesser nobility a few 

 centuries later. John Doe had a numerous family, of which 

 five sons married, and have descendants now living in local- 

 ities not far apart in New England and in many localities 

 west of the Hudson River. There are descendants of these 

 different brothers living as neighbors in several instances 

 who do not know that they share a common ancestry. Now, 

 it is or is not a matter of fact and observation whether these 

 people, bearing a common surname and descended through 

 from five to eight generations from a common ancestor, ex- 

 hibit certain traits, or rather a combination of certain traits, 

 which may be called in the aggregate a " Doe character." 

 From our knowledge of the family taken as a whole, that is, 

 the descendants of the five brothers taken together, we de- 

 clare that there is an unmistakable "Doe character." 



If you ask us to describe this character we must decline to 

 do so. It is not necessary. Like all human character it is 

 a mixture of good and bad. Moreover, it might be recog- 

 nized, and we might be restrained from exhibiting our thesis 

 with scientific clearness and precision. Again, there are 

 subtle elements of human character that defy adequate ex- 

 pression in words, and yet are quickly recognized. Never- 

 theless, we will state how it has been proved to us as an 

 individual: In the first place, by our own observation di- 

 rected for several years by a knowledge of certain principles 

 acquired in breeding animals; again by remarks made to us, 

 neither solicited nor suggested by us, by members of the 

 "Doe family," who had no knowledge of each other's exis- 



