Heredity : a study with special reference to disease / by R.A. Douglas Lithgow.

  • Robert Alexander Douglas-Lithgow
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Heredity : a study with special reference to disease / by R.A. Douglas Lithgow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    13 in every age ; hence the amazing peculiarity of the Jewish race, whose recognition of the force of heredity is shown by their having, at an early period, founded part of their judicial system in accordance with the observed transmission of physical, intellectual, and moral peculiarities from parents to children. The Greeks, also, were fully conversant with these phenomena, and the Spartans, regarding them as of still greater importance, actually made a selection from their newly-born children, thus endeavouring to secure only the “ survival of the fittest! ” The Romans, likewise, distin guished families by their hereditary peculiarities, denomina ting them on account of physical characteristics as nasones , or big-nosed ; labeones , or thick-lipped ; the buccones , or swollen-cheeked , and the capitones , or big-headed. The facts concerning the transmission of family likenesses, and of general characteristic resemblances which descend from ancestry and parents to children are so well and universally recognised that I need not now dwell upon them further; they may be observed in every family, and wherever there are parents and children may be studied with much interest, not only as to the inheritance of family characteristics, but with special regard to the still more curious phenomena of individual peculiarities. It may here be observed that children, whose likeness to their mother is more apparent at one period of their lives, become much more like their father at another period. In accounting for this it has been stated that these phenomena depend upon the deep- lying potentialities of the family stock, which lie hidden and dormant in every individual until developed by either “ the shock of the constitutional changes which take place naturally at particular epochs of life—the intimate bodily changes that are induced by the disturbing effects of such
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