Offspring

“ What, let me ask, are the principal phenomena of heredity? There must be physical continuity between parent, or parents, and offspring, so that the offspring is, as Erasmus Darwin well said, a kind of elongation of the life of the parent. ”

“ So that the one end to which, in all living beings, the formative impulse is tending—the one scheme which the Archæus of the old speculators strives to carry out, seems to be to mould the offspring into the likeness of the parent. It is the first great law of reproduction, that the offspring tends to resemble its parent or parents, more closely than anything else.
Science will some day show us how this law is a necessary consequence of the more general laws which govern matter; but for the present, more can hardly be said than that it appears to be in harmony with them. ”

“ I will now show that offspring can be, and not very infrequently is, affected by occurrences that have produced a deep impression on the parent organism—the effect produced on the offspring being such as leaves no doubt that it is to be connected with the impression produced on the parent. ”

“ Owing to the imperfection of language the offspring is termed a new animal, but is in truth a branch or elongation of the parent; since a part of the embryon-animal is, or was, a part of the parent; and therefore in strict language it cannot be said to be entirely new at the time of its production; and therefore it may retain some of the habits of the parent-system. ”

“ That injuries incurred during life are but seldom transmitted to the offspring does not appear to me wonderful: the inheritance of the complete form and complete activities of the organism, which took root such enormously long periods of time ago, and has been strengthened at each generation, will, as a rule, counterbalance in the offspring any such injuries incurred only once and not repeated. ”

“ Though the causes of peculiarities appearing in the parent, and the inheriting of them by the offspring, are still unknown, or very obscure, nevertheless we know it to be a fact that peculiarities—good or bad—affecting a parent may, and often do, reappear in the offspring in the manner just illustrated. ”

“ All are but recognitions of the same common fact that offspring exhibit various characteristics similar to those of their progenitors.
Blood Heritage.—To this phenomenon of resemblance in successive generations based on ancestry the term heredity is applied. In man, for instance, there is a marked tendency toward the reappearance in offspring of structures, habits, features, and even personal mannerisms, minute physical defects, and intimate mental peculiarities like those possessed by their parents or more remote forebears. ”

“ This physiological truth and the necessity of securing the full assent of the mother in the joint creation of superior offspring, are important facts bearing on the character and happiness of one-half of the human race, and influencing through that half the quality of offspring. ”

“ And then to this pleasurable care of offspring, increasing in duration as the family develops, has to be added an entirely new factor—the reciprocal pleasurable care of parents by offspring: a factor which, feeble where the family is rudimentary and gaining strength as the family develops, serves in another way to lessen the sacrifice of the individual to the maintenance of the species, and begins, contrariwise, to make the maintenance of the species conduce to the more prolonged life, as well as to the higher life, of the individual. ”

“ Memory, intelligence, judgment, imagination, passions, diseases, and what is usually called genius, are often very markedly traced in the offspring.—I have known mental impressions forcibly impressed upon the offspring at the time of conception, as concomitant of some peculiar eccentricity, idiosyncrasy, morbidness, waywardness, irritability, or proclivity of either one or both parents. ”

“ When we reflect upon the fact that unimportant acquired characteristics can be reproduced in offspring, we are apt to forget that offspring is only a full-sized reproduction of the parent—a reproduction, moreover, that goes as far as possible into detail. We are so accustomed to consider family resemblance a matter of course, that we are sometimes surprised when a child is in some respect unlike its parent ”

“ Again, it seems to me that there is a direct tendency to improve the offspring by a sort of struggle in the embryo among the various qualities inherited from both sides, and a survival of the best and strongest—a sort of pre-potency of strong qualities. ”

“ The offspring is like its parent, not because it includes an immortal typical form, but because it is exposed in development to the same conditions as was its parent. Elsewhere I have endeavoured to show that we must acknowledge this absolute dominion of physical agents over organic forms as the fundamental principle in all the sciences of organization; indeed, the main object of my work on Physiology was to enforce this very doctrine. ”

“ The surest guarantee against the occurrence of conditions which may injuriously affect the future offspring, either at the time of procreation, or during the subsequent period of gestation, is to be found in the general life of the parents. ”

“ All That a Child Possesses at Birth Not Necessarily Hereditary.—We come now to the more specific discussion of what may happen to offspring of mammals, and particularly man, in the interval between fertilization and birth ”

“ With the selection of more extreme parents, the absolute regression of the offspring has not increased, but on the contrary has slightly diminished—that is, the advance made by the parents is retained by their offspring. ”

“ The new view is, that instincts arise from variations in the germ-plasm. The union of the germ elements of two individuals causes it to vary more or less from either parent. These variations will be favorable and unfavorable. The unfavorable ones will produce offspring handicapped in the struggle for life and they will disappear. The favorable variations will produce descendants possessing [122] advantages for survival and leave numerous offspring. ”

“ This imperfect union of parental constitutions in the constitution of offspring is yet more clearly illustrated by the reappearance of peculiarities traceable to bygone generations. Forms, dispositions, and diseases, possessed by distant progenitors, habitually come out from time to time in descendants. Some single feature, or some solitary tendency, will again and again show itself after being apparently lost. ”

“ Life's Experiences Affecting Child.—Unless characteristics acquired by an individual, that is, [73] the modifications of the organism due to his own life experiences, are capable of being handed down to his offspring, it is difficult to see how any progress could be made in the development of the race. ”

“ This love of the mother in quadrupeds to the offspring, whom she licks and cleans, is so allied to the pleasure of the taste or palate, that nature seems to have had a great escape in the parent quadruped not devouring her offspring. Bitches, and cats, and sows, eat the placenta; and if a dead offspring occurs, I am told, that also is sometimes eaten, and yet the living offspring is spared ”

“ Let us contemplate at our leisure this delightful image of the maternal reverie—of that second childbirth by which she completes the invisible object of her love—the unknown offspring of desire.
A delightful spectacle, but even more sublime than delightful. Let us be modest here. With us the mother loves that which stirs in her bosom—that which she touches, clasps, enfolds in assured possession; she loves the reality, certain, agitated and moving, which responds to her own movements. ”

“ The greater dissimilarity of the successive children of the same family in comparison with twins, which often resemble each other in external appearance, mental disposition, and constitution, in so extraordinary a manner, apparently proves that the state of the parents at the exact period of conception, or the nature of the subsequent embryonic development, has a direct and powerful influence on the character of the offspring. ”

“ The cases in which such unions have resulted in the production of offspring, but in which the offspring so produced prove to be infertile—that is, incapable of producing offspring in their turn—are much more numerous. ”

“ It will be shown in this work, that there exist not only an influence of beauty and defects on offspring, but peculiar laws regulating the resemblance of progeny to parents—laws which regard the mode in which the organization of parents affects that of children, or regulates the organs which each parent respectively bestows. ”

“ Offspring are Part of their Ancestors.—We can see that if you or I receive characteristics from our parents and they received characteristics from their parents, then we too must have some of the characteristics of the grandparents, and it is a matter of common knowledge that each of us does have some trait or lineament which can be traced back to our grandfather or grandmother. ”

“ The number of the offspring is greatly reduced. The ovum of the female and the sperm of the male become microscopic. The germ of life remains within the body of the mother until it has reached that stage of development which fits it for its independent life in the outer world. The pe [Pg 80] riod from conception to birth is greatly prolonged, and the periods of deliverance from the necessity of the reproductive act are alike extended. The higher in the scale the more dependent the offspring, until in the instance of man the offspring is the most helpless and dependent of all. ”

“ The proverb has it that the thistle does not bring forth grapes; so, among ourselves, there is always a likeness, more or less marked and distinct, between children and their parents. That is a matter of familiar and ordinary observation. We notice the same thing occurring in the cases of the domestic animals–dogs, for instance, and their offspring. In all these cases of propagation and perpetuation, there seems to be a tendency in the offspring to take the characters of the parental organisms. ”

“ Nature making no mistake, never putting on a fresh kind of leg, or head, or tail, but always tending to repeat and to return to the primitive type.
It is the same in sexual reproduction: it is a matter of perfectly common experience, that the tendency on the part of the offspring always is, speaking broadly, to reproduce the form of the parents. ”

“ More than any previous writer, Erasmus Darwin, with 'prophetic sagacity,' insisted strongly on the essential unity of parent and offspring—a truth which lies at the very base of all modern philosophical biology. ”

“ And further evolution, causing along with higher nature diminished fertility, and therefore smaller burdens on parents, may be expected to bring a state in which, far more than now, the pleasures of adult life will consist in raising offspring to perfection while simultaneously furthering the immediate happiness of offspring. ”

“ I have quoted direct evidence adduced by competent observers, which is, I believe, sufficient to establish the fact that offspring can be and is sometimes modified by the acquired habits of a progenitor. ”

“ A noble life in the parent will bear fruit in the physical, intellectual and moral character of the child, and although this is true in relation to the father as well as to the mother, it is doubly true as to the latter, seeing that the mother alone is the bearer and nourisher of offspring during the period of gestation. ”

“ For example, it is a matter of common observation that a child with light hair and blue eyes may have dark-eyed and brown-haired parents. The fact of difference is a phenomenon of variation; the causes for this fact cannot be found in any other category than that comprising the hereditary and congenital influences of parent upon offspring. ”

“ Thus we may suppose it possible that, in some cases, the care of offspring may have been preceded by a habit of care, on the part of the female animal, for her eggs, which, as habit, was pleasurable, but was connected with no consciousness of the offspring produced from the eggs until some new circumstance of environment brought them within ken. ”

“ What parents have to realize is the necessity of so training and instructing their children that they may become capable of being the parents of perfect offspring. The good tree only can bear good fruit. ”

“ Among these ‘factors’ of a living creature parents commonly find a place,—two parents generally; in some cases, only one; in some cases, not even one, if we are to believe the advocates of spontaneous generation, or the still popular view in regard to the Creation. To the parental factors of any particular offspring must be161 added those which are constituted by food and climate and a multitude of changes and chances in the whole course of its existence. ”

“ If you breed from the male and female of the same race, you of course have offspring of the like kind; and if you make the offspring breed together, you obtain the same result; and if you breed from these again, you will still have the same kind of offspring ”

“ It cannot be true, therefore, that among animals, some of the offspring will possess the desirable qualities of the parents in a greater degree; ”

“ Instances are sufficiently common among the lower animals where the offspring exhibit more or less distinctly over and beyond the characters of the male by which they were begotten, the peculiarities also of a male by which their mother at some former period had been impregnated. ”

“ That these gains or losses of organic development, due to use or disuse, are transmitted to offspring, provided they have been common to both sexes, or to the animals from which the offspring have descended. ”

“ The principle, so fruitful in important social consequences among animals, that the offspring owes its parentage jointly to two individuals of different sexes, or, in other words, must always have a father and a mother, equally prevails in the vegetable kingdom. ”