“How long have you personally known this family, and have you ever seen these two sets of children?”
“I have known the family intimately ever since the first marriage and I have seen both sets of children very often.”
“You certainly have had abundant opportunity to know whereof you affirm, and the facts seem so plain that it would be a refinement on folly to undertake to contradict them; but there is one element in this case that has not been explained, and it is a vital one. How are we to know whether some man of ‘sandy complexion’ and with ‘hair and eyes just the color of yours,’ is not the father of this second set of children?”
This ended the colloquy in a “roof-raising” shout, and I never have been called upon since, in a public meeting, to even allude to the “heredity of influence.” With the experiences of thousands of years of miscegnatious breeding between the ass and the mare and no indication among the writers of the ancients as to the evil and abiding effects of first impregnations; and with the experiences of more than a century in this country, with the same results, we are compelled to throw over all claims of this kind until furnished with full and complete pedigrees of the sire and dam, showing the color and markings of each individual for a number of generations.
Heredity of Acquired Characters and Instincts.—On this point there is a lack of unanimity among the promoters of the “primordial germ” theory, and the principal advocate of the negative side of this question appears to be Professor Weismann. Mere opinions of men, no difference how profound their learning, cannot be of any value, unless they are sustained by actual experiences, on questions of this kind. To determine this matter we are not dependent upon any of the explanations of the central Darwinian hypothesis of creation without a Creator, for we have all around us, safely within the historic period of human observation and experience, mountains of evidence, so to speak, heaped upon us, going to show that “acquired character and instincts” are transmitted and become hereditary.
Dr. Pritchard, in his “Natural History of Man,” gives the following illustration on this point:
“Two other very important observations made by M. Roulin, in South America, were pointed out by M. Geoffrey St. Hillaire, in his report to the Academy of Sciences. They refer to the fact of the hereditary transmission of habits originally impressed with care and art upon the ancestors. Of this fact I will adduce other examples in the sequel; at present I only advert to M. Roulin’s observations. The horses bred on the grazing farms of the table-lands of the Cordillera are carefully taught a peculiar pace, which is a sort of running amble. This is not their natural mode of progression, but they are inured to it very early, and the greatest pains are taken to prevent them from moving in any other gait; in this way the acquired habit becomes a second nature. It happens occasionally that such horses becoming lame, or no longer fit for use, it is then customary to let them loose, if they happen to be well grown stallions, into the pasture grounds. It is constantly observed that these horses become the sires of a race to which the ambling pace is natural, and which requires no teaching. The fact is so well known that such colts have received a particular name; they are termed ‘aguilillas.’”
The fact that there were some pacers in South America came to me from many sources, and especially from gentlemen of intelligence and character who had spent years in that country, and was for a long time a puzzle to me. All the evidences of history went to show that the horse stock of South America was Spanish, and no evidence could be found that the Spanish horse was a pacer, or that there was any tendency to pace in the blood of the Spanish horse. This report to the French Academy of Sciences was made in the early part of this century and is really the first information I have ever had of Spanish horses pacing. Dr. Pritchard was one of the earlier modern writers on natural history and stands very high as a man of conscience as well as learning. The surprising feature in this South American experience is the wide and, apparently, immediate measure of success that seems to have followed the training to the pacing gait in its transmission. It may be taken as a rule that the changing of the gait from the diagonal to the lateral, or vice versa, is a slow process, and it seems to me that with few exceptions it would require several generations before the new habit of action would become fixed in the breed. It is just possible, however, that there may have been a tincture of pacing blood in the Spanish horses of the sixteenth century. The Visigoths, one of the early Asiatic hordes that overran Europe, first settled in Scandinavia, and the southern part of Sweden is still called “Gothland.” After a long stay in that country they became dissatisfied with soil and climate and determined to seek another. According to the historians, they first migrated in a southeastward direction and from there in a southwestward till they reached the southern part of France, from which they soon passed over into Spain, which they subdued, and established there a dynasty which lasted two hundred years. In A.D. 711 the Saracens from Africa crossed over, and after a very bloody battle lasting two days, defeated Rhoderic, the last of the dynasty, and cut his army to pieces. In Scandinavia, and especially in Norway and Sweden, we find plenty of dun horses that are pacers, and they are recognized as a very old breed. In the mountains of Spain we also find small dun horses, and it is, perhaps, not an unreasonable possibility that the Visigoths may have carried some of their horse stock with them in their migration from the North to the South of Europe, and thus this habit of action that may have remained for centuries latent in the breed may have been unusually plastic in its restoration. This, however, is a mere surmise as to a possibility and cannot displace the historic observations reported by M. Roulin and presented before the French Academy. The gait of the South American pacers, as I understand it, is not that of the pure pace, with two strokes completing the revolution, but is more like the “saddle gaits” that we find in the West and Southwest of our own country. The true pace seems to be exceptional, because that is not a saddle gait. It is a fact often observed in this country that foals from parents trained to the saddle gaits will take to those gaits naturally and as soon as they are dropped. In a preceding part of this work I have given some consideration to the fact that three or four hundred years ago the horses of our English ancestors were largely pacers, and to the methods adopted in that day for changing the action from the diagonal to the lateral gait—the hopples, rattles, weights, etc. The descendants of those horses, brought to this country by the colonists, as will be seen at another place, were nearly all pacers.
The following letter, addressed by Dr. William Huggins to Charles Darwin and by him published in “Nature” twenty years ago, very strongly illustrates the heredity of instincts, and as it is authentic and true beyond question I will here insert it. Dr. Huggins says:
“I wish to communicate to you a curious case of mental peculiarity. I possess an English mastiff, by name Kepler, a son of the celebrated Turk out of Venus. I brought the dog, when six weeks old, from the stable in which he was born. The first time I took him out he started back in alarm at the first butcher’s shop he had ever seen. I soon found he had a violent antipathy to butchers and butchers’ shops. When six months old a servant took him with her on an errand. At a short distance before coming to the house she had to pass a butcher’s shop; the dog threw himself down (being led by a string), and neither coaxing nor threats would make him pass the shop. The dog was too heavy to be carried, and as a crowd collected, the servant had to return with the dog more than a mile, and then go without him. This occurred about two years ago. The antipathy still continues, but the dog will pass nearer to a shop than he formerly would. About two months ago, in a little book on dogs, published by Dean, I discovered that the same strange antipathy is shown in the father, Turk. I then wrote to Mr. Nichols, the former owner of Turk, to ask him for any information he might have on the point. He replied: ‘I can say that the same antipathy exists in King, the sire of Turk, in Turk, in Punch (son of Turk), out of Meg, and in Paris (son of Turk out of Juno). Paris has the greatest antipathy, as he would hardly go into a street where a butcher’s shop is, and would run away after passing it. When a cart with a butcher’s man came into the place where the dogs were kept, although they could not see him, they all were ready to break their chains. A master butcher, dressed privately, called one evening on Paris’ master to see the dog. He had hardly entered the house before the dog (though shut in) was so much excited that he had to be put into a shed, and the butcher was forced to leave before seeing the dog. The same dog, at Hastings, made a spring at a gentleman who came into the hotel. The owner caught the dog and apologized, and said he never knew him to do so before, except when a butcher came to his house. The gentleman at once said that was his business. So you see that they inherited these antipathies, and show a great deal of breed.’”