The choice of a mate.

  • Anthony Ludovici
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details
    90/546 page 60
    dysfunction, and with an acutely grave correlation of morbid factors. Even the lucky individual, however, who looks healthy, sound, and handsome in a random-bred stock, bears in his hereditary equipment the deleterious elements common to his parental stocks, which produced his less fortunate brothers. This explains why, in a random-bred stock, children are often so unaccount ably inferior, and sometimes so unaccountably superior to their parents. In fact it explains all the anomalies which the opponents of the hereditary principle habitually advance as arguments against it, and which are thus seen to be no arguments against it at all. There is, therefore, no certainty of reckoning with random- bred stocks, and it is all-important to remember that in such stocks, in which the germ-plasm (i.e. the hereditary equipment of the stock) is not stabilized, it is not safe to judge by appearances, especially in the case of an individual who is an exception, as regards vigour, beauty, or intelligence, in his stock or family. 1 This is, of course, also true of the so-called geniuses that some times arise in mixed random-bred stocks. They too are just lucky strokes which it would be ridiculous to hope to see repeated, for how could they breed true ? The fact that Marcus Aurelius and Napoleon had no geniuses as sons is thus seen to be (quite apart from the mate in each case, who may have been unsuitable) no argument against, but rather in favour of, the hereditary principle. 2 Now what happens if we inbreed from stocks hitherto random- bred ? If instead of taking a male and a female from different families in a mixed random-bred stock, we take, say, brother and sister, mother and son, or father and daughter, we may picture the conjunction of their two germ-cells as an intermingling of portions of a supply of wool from only one shop ; and we must imagine the supply of wools in the one shop as being divided into two halves, one half on one side of the shop and one half on the other ; and each half of the stock as containing wools represented in the other half. 1 H., p. 63 : “ Another lesson that is to be learned from the facts of inheritance is that appearance alone is not a reliable guide to breeding ability and that a more certain method ... is the progeny test.” I think if Dr. Crew had inserted the words “ in random-bred stocks ”, after the word “ alone ” he would have been more correct. 2 See infra, p. 113 et seq.
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