168 PHYSICAL INVESTIGATION. [PART I. 



The pains taken to fathom the mode in which the peculiar 

 bodily organization is transmitted from parent to offspring 

 have hitherto been unsuccessful. There has not been wanting 

 a number of theories, but not one has proved itself unexcep- 

 tional and trustworthy. Thus it frequently happens among 

 animals and human beings that the offspring resembles the 

 male parent in hair, colour, constitution, diseases, malformation 

 and idiosyncracies. As collateral relations (cousins, uncles, 

 and nephews) frequently exhibit the same peculiarities with- 

 out having received them direct from their parents, we are 

 led to suppose that these phenomena obey a law (the so-called 

 relapse that is to say, the reproduction of the peculiarities of 

 remote ancestors in the descendants, has by Grirou been con- 

 sidered as a general law, by which he endeavoured to explain 

 all the differences of children from their parents), the compre- 

 hension of which would require a profounder knowledge of the 

 dependence of the development of the germ than we at present 

 possess. 



Sometimes the father, at other times the mother, has been 

 considered as possessing an exclusive influence on the peculiari- 

 ties of children. Again it has been asserted that the father 

 influenced the psychical, and the mother the physical, constitu- 

 tion of the offspring; or again, that they influence separate 

 parts of the system. Thus, according to Sturm and Grirou, the 

 young in domestic animals resemble the father in the form of 

 the head and the chest, and the mother in the formation of the 

 pelvis and the posterior part, a view which Blumenbach felt in- 

 clined to adopt also as regards man. Some were of opinion 

 that, where one child took after one parent, it was both phy- 

 sically and psychically. Others considered the influence of the 

 father paramount, not a few that of the mother, so that the 

 sons resembled the father, and the daughters the mother, a 

 case which, however, is frequently reversed. There was, in fact, 

 no theory which had not its supporters. 1 We quote the follow- 

 ing interesting observation of Burmeister, 2 " Generally speaking, 

 the first child exhibits physically the finest organization, and 



1 See Lucas, " Traite de Fberedite," vol. ii. 

 3 Loc. cit., ii, p. 162. 



