Applied Eugenics | Page 6

of the two it was.
One head master used to say he would never flog the innocent for the
guilty, and the other used to flog them both.'
"No less than nine anecdotes have reached me of a twin seeing his or
her reflection in the looking-glass, and addressing it in the belief that it
was the other twin in person.
"Children are usually quick in distinguishing between their parent and
his or her twin; but I have two cases to the contrary. Thus, the daughter
of a twin says:
"'Such was the marvelous similarity of their features, voice, manner,
etc., that I remember, as a child, being very much puzzled, and I think,
had my aunt lived much with us, I should have ended by thinking I had
two mothers!'
"In the other case, a father who was a twin, remarks of himself and his
brother:
"'We were extremely alike, and are so at this moment, so much so that
our children up to five and six years old did not know us apart.'
"Among my thirty-five detailed cases of close similarity, there are no
less than seven in which both twins suffered from some special ailment
or had some exceptional peculiarity. Both twins are apt to sicken at the
same time in no less than nine out of the thirty-five cases. Either their
illnesses, to which I refer, were non-contagious, or, if contagious, the
twins caught them simultaneously; they did not catch them the one
from the other."
Similarity in association of ideas, in tastes and habits was equally close.
In short, their resemblances were not superficial, but extremely intimate,
both in mind and body, while they were young; they were reared
almost exactly alike up to their early manhood and womanhood.
Then they separated into different walks of life. Did this change of the

environment alter their inborn character? For the detailed evidence, one
should consult Galton's own account; we give only his conclusions:
In many cases the resemblance of body and mind continued unaltered
up to old age, notwithstanding very different conditions of life; in
others a severe disease was sufficient to account for some change
noticed. Other dissimilarity that developed, Galton had reason to
believe, was due to the development of inborn characters that appeared
late in life. He therefore felt justified in broadly concluding "that the
only circumstance, within the range of those by which persons of
similar conditions of life are affected, that is capable of producing a
marked effect on the character of adults, is illness or some accident
which causes physical infirmity. The twins who closely resembled each
other in childhood and early youth, and were reared under not very
dissimilar conditions, either grow unlike through the development of
natural [that is, inherited] characteristics which had lain dormant at first,
or else they continue their lives, keeping time like two watches, hardly
to be thrown out of accord except by some physical jar."
Here was a distinct failure of nurture to modify the inborn nature. We
next consider the ordinary twins who were unlike from the start. Galton
had twenty such cases, given with much detail. "It is a fact," he
observes, "that extreme dissimilarity, such as existed between Jacob
and Esau, is a no less marked peculiarity of twins of the same sex than
extreme similarity." The character of the evidence as a whole may be
fairly conveyed by a few quotations:
(1) One parent says: "They have had exactly the same nurture from
their birth up to the present time; they are both perfectly healthy and
strong, yet they are otherwise as dissimilar as two boys could be,
physically, mentally, and in their emotional nature."
(2) "I can answer most decidedly that the twins have been perfectly
dissimilar in character, habits, and likeness from the moment of their
birth to the present time, though they were nursed by the same woman,
went to school together, and were never separated until the age of
thirteen."

(3) "They have never been separated, never the least differently treated
in food, clothing, or education; both teethed at the same time, both had
measles, whooping cough, and scarlatina at the same time, and neither
has had any other serious illness. Both are and have been exceedingly
healthy, and have good abilities; yet they differ as much from each
other in mental cast as any one of my family differs from another."
(4) "Very dissimilar in mind and body; the one is quiet, retiring, and
slow but sure; good-tempered, but disposed to be sulky when
provoked;--the other is quick, vivacious, forward, acquiring easily and
forgetting soon; quick-tempered and choleric, but quickly forgiving and
forgetting. They have been educated together and never separated."
(5) "They were never alike either in mind or body, and their
dissimilarity increases daily.