APPENDIX D. 233 



conspicuous. Elsewhere there is not the slightest indication of a 

 dislike in persons of similar tempers, whether mild, docile, fretful, 

 violent, or masterful, to marry one another. The large initial 

 figures 6 and 13 catch the eye, and at a first glance impress them- 

 selves unduly on the imagination, and might lead to erroneous 

 speculations about mild tempered persons, perhaps that they find one 

 another rather insipid ; but the reasons I have given, show conclu- 

 sively that the recorded rarity of the marriages between mild-tempered 

 persons is only apparent. Lastly, if we disregard the five smaller 

 classes and attend only to the main divisions of good and bad 

 temper, there does not appear to be much bias for, or against, the 

 marriage of good or bad-tempered persons in their own or into the 

 opposite division. 



The admixture of different tempers among the brothers and 

 sisters of the same family is a notable fact, due to various causes 

 which act in different directions. It is best to consider them before 

 we proceed to collect evidence and attempt its interpretation. It 

 becomes clear enough, and may be now taken for granted, that the 

 tempers of progenitors do not readily blend in the offspring, but 

 that some of the children take mainly after one of them, some after 

 another, but with a few threads, as it were, of various ancestral 

 tempers woven in, which occasionally manifest themselves. If no 

 other influences intervened, the tempers of the children in the same 

 family would on this account be almost as varied as those of their 

 ancestors ; and these, as we have just seen, married at haphazard, 

 so far as their tempers were concerned ; therefore the numbers of 

 good and bad children in families would be regulated by the same 

 laws of chance that apply to a gambling table. But there are other 

 influences to be considered. There is a well-known tendency to 

 family likeness among brothers and sisters, which is due, not to 

 the blending of ancestral peculiarities, but to the prepotence of one 

 of the progenitors, who stamped more than his or her fair share of 

 qualities upon the descendants. It may be due also to a familiar 

 occurrence that deserves but has not yet received a distinctive name, 

 namely, where all the children are alike and yet their common 

 likeness cannot be traced to their progenitors. A new variety has 

 come into existence through a process that affects the whole Frater- 

 nity and may result in an unusually stable variety (see Chapter III.). 

 The most strongly marked family type that I have personally met 



