V. THE HEREDITY OF RICHARD ROE. "Vom Vater hab' ich die Statur."*-Goethe. Formation of character. WHEN Richard Roe was born, "the gate of gifts was closed" to him. Henceforth he must expect nothing new and must devote himself to the development of the heritage he had received from his father and mother. He must bring its discordant elements into some sort of harmony. He must form his Ego by the union of these elements. He must soften down their contradictions. He must train his elements of strength to be helpful to some one in some way, that others may be helpful *"Stature from father and the mood Stern views of life compelling ; Great-grandsire's passion was the fair, Great-granddam's, pomp and gold and show, And in my bones I feel it. "Of all the various elements That make up this complexity, What is there left when all is done, To call originality?" GOETHE: Zahme Xenien, vi; Bayard Taylor's translation in part. to him. He must give his weak powers exercise, so that their weakness shall not bring him disaster in the competition of life. For it is likely that somewhere, somehow, it will be proved that no chain is stronger than its weakest link. Other powers not too weak, nor over strong, Richard Roe must perforce neglect, because in the hurry of life there is not time for every desirable thing. In these ways the character of Richard Roe's inheritance is steadily changing under his hands. As he grows older, one after another of the careers that might have been his, the men he might have been, vanish from his path forever. On the other hand, by steady usage a slender thread of capacity has so grown as to become like strong cordage. Thus Richard Roe learns anew the old parable of the talents. The power he hid in a napkin is taken away altogether, while that which is placed at usury is returned a hundredfold. Now, for the purpose of this discussion, you, gentle reader, "who are an achievement of importance," or I, ungentle writer, concerning whom the less said the better, may be Richard Roe. So might any of your friends or acquaintances. So far as methods and principles are concerned, Richard Roe may be your lapdog or your favourite horse-or even your bête noire, if you cherish beasts of that character. Any beast will do. With Algernon Fitzclarence de Courcy or Clara Vere de Vere the case would be just the same. Let Richard Roe stand at present for the lay figure of heredity—or, if it seems best to you to humanize this discussion, let him be a man. The man Richard Roe enters life with a series of qualities and tendencies granted him by heredity. Let us examine this series. Let us analyze the contents of this pack which he is to carry through life to the gates. Hereditary tendencies. of the Golden City. Inheritance of humanity. First, from his parents, Richard Roe has inherited humanity, the parts and organs and feelings of a man. "Hath he not eyes? Hath he not hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as you or I or any other king or beggar we know of? "If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" All this, the common heritage of Jew or Gentile, goes to the making of Richard Roe. His ancestors on both sides have been human, and that for many and many generations, so that "the knowledge of man runneth not to the contrary." Even the prehuman ancestry, dimly seen by the faith of science, had in it the potentialities of manhood. Descended for countless ages from man and woman, man born of woman Richard Roe surely is. We may go farther with certainty. Richard Roe will follow the race type of his parentage. If he is AngloSaxon, as his name seems to denote, all Anglo-Saxon by blood, he will be all Inheritance of race characters. Anglo-Saxon in quality. To his characters of common humanity we may add those common to the race. He will not be negro nor Mongolian, and he will have at least some traits and tendencies not found in the Latin races of southern Europe. But his friends will know Richard Roe best not by the great mass of his human traits nor by his race characteristics. These may be predominant and ineradicable, but they are not distinctive. He must be known by his peculiarities, by his specialties and his deficiencies. Individual characters. Within the narrowest type there is room for an almost infinite play in the minor variations. For almost any possible one of these, Richard Roe could find warrant in his ancestry. His combination of them must be his own. That is his individuality. Colour of the eyes and hair, length of nose, hue of skin, form of ears, size of hands, character of thumb prints, in all these and ten thousand other particulars some allotment must fall to Richard Roe. 1 He must have some combination of his own, for Nature has "broken the die" in moulding each of his ancestors, and will tolerate no servile copy of any of her works. By the law of sex, Richard Roe has twice as many ancestors as his father or mother had. Therefore these could give him anything they had severally received from their own parents. The hereditary gifts must be divided in some way, else Richard Roe would be speedily overborne by them. Furthermore, any system of division Nature may adopt could only be on the average an equal division. Richard Roe's father might supply half his endowment of inborn characters, his mother furnishing the other half. Nature tries to arrange for some partition like this. But she can never divide evenly, and some qualities will not bear division. Richard Roe's share forms a sort of mosaic, made partly of unchanged characters standing side by side in new combinations, partly a mixture of characters, and part of characters in perfect blending. The physical reason for all this the physiologists are just beginning to trace. The machinery of division and integration they find in the germ cell The germ cell. itself the egg and its male cognate. At the same time they find that Nature's love of variation is operative even here. She has never yet made two eggs or two sperm cells exactly alike. The germ cell, male or female-and the two are alike in all characters essential to this discussion—is one of the vital units or body cells set apart for a special purpose. It is not essentially different from other cells, either in structure or in origin. But in its growth it is capable of repeating the whole organism from which it came, "with the precision of a work of art." The germ cell is made up of protoplasm, a jelly-like substance, less simple than it appears, not a "substance" at all, in fact, but a structure Protoplasm. as complex as any in Nature. In connection with this structure all known phenomena of life are shown. Inside the germ cell, or in any other cell, is a smaller cellule called the nucleus. In connection with the nucleus appear most of the phenomena of hereditary transmission. Its structure in the higher animals is a complicated arrangement of loops and bands, the material of which these are made being called chromatin. This name, chromatin, is given because its substance takes a deeper Chromatin. stain or colour (chroma in Greek) than ordinary protoplasm or other cell materials. In the chromatin are the determinants of heredity, and these preside in some way over all movements and all changes of the protoplasm. In the fertilized egg, the mixed chromatin of the two cells which have been fused into one may be said to contain the architect's plan by which the coming animal is to be built up. In the mixed chromatin of the cell which is to grow and to divide, to separate and integrate, till it forms Richard Roe, the potentialities of Richard Roe all lie in some way hidden. How this is we can not tell. We know that the structure of a single cell is a highly complex matter, more * * For a discussion of this and other views more or less hypothetical, see the essay on the Physical Basis of Heredity. |