What a Young Woman Ought to Know

by Mary Wood-Allen

He wrote: "I bequeath to my son John my big bony frame and the slouching gait I acquired by carelessness, also my inherited tendency to consumption. To my daughter Mary I bequeath my sallow complexion and torpid liver, which are the result of my gross living; also my melancholy disposition and tendency to look on the dark side of life. To my son Samuel I give my love for alcoholic liquors and my irritable disposition; to my daughter Jane my coarseness of thought and my unwillingness to be restrained in my desires, and also my tendency to commit suicide."

"A very strange will," said everybody, and yet it was a will that was probated long before the testator's death. That it gave perfect satisfaction I will not assert, but it was never contested and paid no fees to lawyers.

Just such wills are being made daily by the lives and conduct of young people, though they are not put into writing. Some time in the future, however, they will be written into "living epistles, known and read of all men."

Other wills are being made daily that through sober, virtuous, youthful lives will bequeath to posterity dowers of health, strength, purity and power.

This being true, it seems only a part of prudent foresight to study in youth the law that governs the transmission of personal characteristics to the future "denizens of life's great city." This law is known as Heredity, and its first written record is in the first chapter of Genesis, where it is written that "Every plant and animal shall bring forth after its kind." We are so accustomed to seeing the results of this law that we give it little or no thought. We see that grass springs up each year on our lawns and meadows. We know that if we put the seeds of a certain flower in the ground, that kind of flower will always spring up, never another kind. The farmer is not anxious, after he sows wheat, for fear that the crop will be rye or barley. We expect that the young of cats will be kittens, of geese will be goslings, of men will be human children, and we are never disappointed. The law holds good under all circumstances.

We see, too, that there are certain race characteristics that maintain. The Mongolian race has peculiar high cheek-bones, sallow complexions and eyes set in bias, and we recognize the Japanese or Chinese at once, even though dressed in the garb of our country. So, too, we recognize the African or the Caucasian by certain marked characteristics. This transmission of racial traits we call race heredity.

Then each race has its own traits, physical or mental, which we recognize as national, and so speak of them. We always mention thrift as an attribute of the Teutonic nations; the Irishman we characterize as witty and pugnacious; the Frenchman as polite; the American as progressive.

Each individual has not only his human inheritance, his race inheritance and his national characteristics, but he has also an endowment of family traits.

But we are not made up of odds and ends of ancestral belongings alone. We have in ourselves something that is original, that makes us different from each other, and from all others. I have sometimes thought that we are somewhat like patchwork quilts, the parti-colored blocks being set together by some solid-colored material; or, better still, we are like "hit and miss" rag carpets, with a warp of our own individuality, filled in with a woof made of qualities and capacities of all those who have preceded us. You know, in making "hit and miss" rag carpets we take little strips and bits of various materials and all colors, and sew them together without regard to order or arrangement, and these long strips are woven back and forth in the warp until the carpet is woven, showing no set pattern, but a mingling of tints and shades that is sometimes crude and unsightly, sometimes soft and artistic.

I used, in childhood, to find great delight in seeking among the blended colors in the carpet for scraps of clothing which I recognized as having belonged to father or mother, or perhaps even to grandparents. Even now, in my maturer years, I am interested in finding in myself the physical, mental or moral characteristics of those same ancestors; and you, no doubt, can do the same, while some of your traits seem to be yours entirely, constituting individual variations upon ancestral inheritances.