Volume 1

Health lectures for the people.

Date:
1883-1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health lectures for the people. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    713/896 (page 25)
    general way. If they were Chinese, so will he be; if they were black, so will he be; if they took long in coming to maturity, so will he ; if they were strong, so will he grow; if they were long lived, so will he have a chance of living; if they were good in a natural sense, the chances are he will be so too ; if they were bad, he will have to struggle hard against his fate to turn out good. Like produces like all the world over. The more minutely the sub- ject of heredity, as it is conveniently called, is studied the more importance it assumes in determining the development of the bodies and minds of men and women. Down even to the minutest points we are finding that this is the cardinal and underlying fact. As we shall see, it may be influenced to some extent by conditions of life, by influences from the outside, by teaching and example, by public opinion, by the codes of morality and religion to which the individual is subjected, but none of these things will so change a man's innate tendencies and potentialities that if he has had a dull brain transmitted to him it will ever become an active one, or if his father and mother have been dwarfs he will become a giant. No doubt we are yet very far from knowing in detail the laws of the hereditary transmission of mental and bodily qualities. We cannot say why a man takes after his father or after his mother, or after any of his four grandparents or after some of his eight great-grandparents (not to go further back), or what gave him the special combination of the qualities of those fourteen nearest ancestors which he possesses. But the latest and most careful observations tend to show that from the moment of birth a man is under the dominion of his ancestry, deriving benefit from their virtues and suffering for their sins in a physiological sense. The latest researches show that from the very moment of birth hereditary influences come in down to the smallest matter, influencing how the body and mind develops and when their qualities appear. The very way the infant holds his bottle, his little tricks of motion and smiling, the time at which he can make out a colour, the way he is affected by a sound, all seem to be determined, not by chance or circum- stance but by ancestral influences. The diseases he will be subject to, the germs of disease he will have the power to