Viavi hygiene for women, men and children / by Hartland Law, Herbert E. Law.

  • Law, Hartland.
Date:
[1905]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Viavi hygiene for women, men and children / by Hartland Law, Herbert E. Law. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    19/618 (page 15)
    THE LAW OF HEREDITY ONE of the most familiar facts in Nature is that like produces like. Rose bushes are never propagated from fig trees. Human beings produce human beings, and nothing else produces them or can be produced by them. That fact establishes the law of heredity. In its stricter appli- cation the law means the transmission of special qualities. In this sense it does not mean alone that black parents will produce black children, brown parents brown children, and white parents white children. It means, in the more restricted sense, that special qualities in the parents will be represented in the children by tendencies to the development of those qualities. It is very difficult to draw the line between broad and restricted tendencies thus trans- missible and transmitted. But the fact that broad characteristics, both physi- cal and mental, are transmitted, to our certain knowledge, creates the pre- sumption that a child will be born with a tendency to develop any stren^h or weakness that one or both of its parents may possess. This tendency appears in the most unexpected and curious forms. Thus, one or two or more generations may be skipped, when a child will be born with the characteristics of a grandparent, a great-grandparent or even a remoter an- cestor. This means that the peculiar characteristic handed down to it has ex- A Striking Lesson in Heredity isted but lain dormant in its parents or other intervening progenitors. Again, a child may be bom with a characteristic that was really foreign to the blood of its progenitors, but was instilled in it by their occupation. For illustration, it was discovered in the case of Jesse Pomeroy, the boy murderer, that although his parents were excellent persons, his father was a butcher and his mother was in the habit of visiting the shambles for several months before the child was born. Neither of these parents had ever developed a homicidal tendency, and yet they were both so inured to the taking of lower lives and the shedding of blood, that it is conceivable that this habit was translated in the child into a homicidal tendency.