Seven ambitious brothers and how they bred a race of kings / editor: Henry Smith Williams, M.D., LL.D.

Date:
[1914]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Seven ambitious brothers and how they bred a race of kings / editor: Henry Smith Williams, M.D., LL.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/32 page 16
    latent qualities that may never be tangibly re- vealed. We shall have occasion to make fuller refer- ence to this aspect of the subject in a moment. Here I wish merely to point out that no two indi- viduals even of the same parentage show pre- cisely the same combination of characters and that the probability of bringing out any given trait obviously increases with the actual number of progeny. As a tangible illustration, Mr. Burbank has him- self called attention to the fact that he was his father’s thirteenth child, and that no one of the dozen children who preceded him manifested any exceptional aptitude for horticultural pursuits. There are numberless cases in history where the man of genius appears as a later member of a mediocre fraternity. So we must recognize that the full racial opportunities of any given strain are not likely to be realized if the progeny are re- stricted to two or three individuals in a fraternity. At first sight, then, it might seem that the en- thusiasts, who have prated about race suicide and urged on humanity in general the duty of having large families, were justified. And indeed, Mr. Burbank’s method of growing vast numbers of seedlings, in order to select the best, may be said to be corroborative. [16]
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