THE INHERITANCE OF FAMILY TRAITS 63 



So far as the data go they support the following conclu- 

 sions. The offspring of two phlegmatic parents tend to be 

 phlegmatic and the nervous parents of purely nervous 

 origin have nervous children. But one phlegmatic parent 

 mated to a nervous one will produce chiefly nervous chil- 

 dren and many who are intermediate. When both parents 

 are nervous with phlegmatic ancestry a fairly large pro- 

 portion (up to about a quarter?) will be phlegmatic. 



15. Handwriting 



Inheritance of peculiarities of handwriting is often al- 

 leged (Darwin, 1894, p. 449), but it is difficult to get 

 satisfactory evidence about it. A correspondent (Hal-2) 

 writes: — "We belong to a family of penmen. My four 

 brothers and myself inherited our handwriting (the Eng- 

 Ush legal copyist's handwriting) from my father. Two of 

 our uncles and two cousins also wrote the family hand. I 

 believe it was asserted that our paternal grandfather wrote 

 the same. We could distinguish the writing of each, but 

 the general family resemblance was there, especially when 

 we were all young men and my father was not old. . . . 

 We descended from a family that included officemen, 

 lawyers, recorders to whom expert penmanship was nec- 

 essary." 



16. General Bodily Energy 



Of the inheritance of this quaUty there can be no doubt. 

 If we take the class of commanders as one characterized 

 above all by bodily energy we see the intensity of its hered- 

 ity. It is exempUfied in the family of Alexander the Great 

 from Philip of Macedon down, the family of Charlemagne 

 including Pepin le Gros and Charles Martel, of Gustavus 

 Adolphus, and of Scipio Africanus. 



