"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves,"
illustrates one phase of the subject. There are, of course, many other things besides the drink habit, with regard to which men are prone to find excuses in heredity, and to consider that somehow their ancestral tendencies make them not quite responsible for actions commonly considered the result of malice or passion, rather than hereditary influence, and our great English poet, knowing men so well, has stated the truth forcibly.
In King Lear there is an often quoted passage which properly stigmatises the opinion in this matter held by those who would find excuses for wrong-doing in hereditary qualities:
"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,—often the surfeit of our own behaviour,—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on; an admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!"
One phase of the question of hereditary tendencies to inebriety is extremely interesting from a physiological and sociological point of view. As the result of carefully gathered statistics, there seems to be no doubt now that when children are conceived while the parents, or either of them, is in a state of drunkenness, the offspring is very likely to be of low-grade physical constitution and often of very neurotic tendencies. In France, particularly in the case of a number of insane children and idiots, histories of this nature have been obtained in confirmation of this unfortunate factor as an element in degeneracy. In general it may be said that about one-third of the admissions to homes for children of low intelligence, as well as to insane asylums, are due to this cause.
There is in this, of course, an added motive for temperance, and it would seem that parents should be warned of the danger to which they are subjecting their offspring by excessive indulgence in alcohol, when it may be followed by such serious and lasting results to the beings on whom their love and affection will be expended in the future. This phase of alcoholic excess has never been taught as insistently as its importance would demand, perhaps because of the delicacy of the subjects which it involves; but it is too significant a factor in making or marring progress in the development of the race to allow any pusillanimous motives to prevent the spread of precious knowledge. [Footnote 3]
[Footnote 3: The present conditions that obtain with regard to the celebration of marriages are very prone to have a certain amount of intoxication as their result. Perhaps, then, it is a fortunate thing, as has often been said, that the first child is not born until some considerable time after it might normally be expected. It has been said more than once, however, that first children are a little more likely to have certain degenerative defects than are others, and a connection has been found between certain abuses of stimulants and incidental exhaustion to account for this. One of the most amusing things to Li Hung Chang, on his travels through our country, was the curious publicity we give to everything connected with marriage, while presumably our Christian ideas should rather counsel a veiling of the mysteries, religious and physical, connected with it. Certain it is that the present tendency towards farewell dinners at clubs, and other festivities of various kinds, are not at all likely to result in benefit to the presumably hoped-for offspring.]
The only real light that has been thrown on the puzzling details of heredity has come from work in the same field in which Mendel made his ground-breaking observations. [{127}] De Vries, the professor of botany at the University of Amsterdam, has succeeded in showing that new species of plants may be made to arise by careful attention to certain anomalous plants which occur from generation to generation. These plants breed true, that is, maintain their own peculiarities. To begin with, they are quite different from the parent plants, and the difference is perpetuated by inbreeding.
So far the problem of the origin of species has been supposed to depend upon the normal variation that is noticed in plants and animals. All living things differ from one another, even though they may belong to the same species, and differ sometimes in remarkable degrees. This continuous variation was supposed to account for the origin of new species when it became excessive. It has become well recognised now, however, that such differences gradually disappear in the course of the normal multiplication of plants and animals. The tendency is much more towards the disappearance than the maintenance of peculiarities.