Primogeniture

“ There are also many other special customs by which the ordinary rule of primogeniture is varied. It may be remarked that the English law of inheritance of land creates a double preference, subject to certain exceptions and customs, in favour of the male over the female and of the first-born among the males. This necessitates the rule of representation by which the issue of children are regarded as standing in the places of their parents, called “ representative primogeniture.” ”

“ The great advantage of those much abused laws of primogeniture, entail, or whatever else they may be which fix the succession in one member of a family, is this—that they are far more apt to keep up a central point, a family home, than any other arrangement yet discovered. ”

“ The right of primogeniture, however, still continues to be respected, and as of all institutions it is the fittest to support the pride of family distinctions, it is still likely to endure for many centuries. ”

“ But in a settled and cultivated country, and among an advanced people, we maintain succession by primogeniture to be the most consonant, as a matter of theory, to the social feelings and requirements of man ”

“ As to our law of primogeniture, which with few and inconsiderable exceptions is the standing law of all our landed inheritance, and which without question has a tendency, and I think a most happy tendency, to preserve a character of consequence, weight, and prevalent influence over others in the whole body of the landed interest, they call loudly for its destruction. ”

“ Among the children of the same family there can be no indisputable difference but that of sex, and that of age. The male sex is universally preferred to the female; and when all other things are equal, the elder everywhere takes place of the younger. Hence the origin of the right of primogeniture, and of what is called lineal succession. ”

“ Many of them become seamen. Some have made discoveries in distant seas. One of the most peculiar of their ideas, and one that may account for the lofty bearing of their women, is, that the right of primogeniture exists among them, but it applies to the first-born child, whether son or daughter! This often places the woman at the head of the house, so that she can say, as few women elsewhere can say, “What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is my own.” ”

“ A system of primogeniture, and entails of small parcels of land, might, in a great measure, identify the interests of all; or, at least, those who held no lands would generally be the children and kinsmen of those who did, and be taken care of by them. ”

“ For the evils of primogeniture were unknown to Roman law. No hereditary caste based on the accident of birth was ever formed; and when we find an aristocracy of birth arising, it is the fittest son who can succeed his father in political office ”

“ When a man dies leaving a widow or widows, a son or sons, a daughter or daughters, brothers or other relatives, the sons alone inherit, and primogeniture is so far observed that the eldest son gets one animal or article, an ox, a brass pot, etc., in excess of the others. ”

“ Escott notices primogeniture as one of the stable and, curious enough, one of the democratic institutions of society. It is owing to primogeniture that while there is a nobility in England there is no noblesse. ”

“ The law of primogeniture is always strictly observed towards these royal insects, the first-born or princess-royal being always selected to go off with the second swarm, or to reign over the parent stock, as the case may be ”

“ All this points very clearly to the absolutely equal division of assets among the male children at death as the practice most usual135 with society at the period when family-dependency is in the first stages of disintegration. Here then emerges the historical difficulty of Primogeniture. ”

“ The law of primogeniture still exists as in England, but with the modification that the inheritor may dispose of one half of the inheritance; and as they are a money-getting and commercial people, the purse is getting the ascendency over title. ”

“ It is evident, however, that in polygamous societies the form of Primogeniture will always tend to vary. Many considerations may constitute a claim on the succession, the rank of the mother, for example, or her degree in the affections of the father. Accordingly, some of the Indian Mahometan sovereigns, without pretending to any distinct testamentary power, claim the right of nominating the son who is to succeed. ”

“ Of sons of two wives of whom only one woman has gone through all the necessary religious ceremonials, or both of whom have not, as maidens, observed necessary religious rites, or one of whom has brought forth twins, it is by birth that primogenitureship is decided. ”

“ The less close similarity of the successive children of the same family in comparison with human 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the child resembles either grandparent more closely than its immediate parents, our attention is not much arrested, though in truth the fact is highly remarkable; but when the child resembles some remote ancestor, or some distant member in a collateral line,—and we must attribute the latter case to the descent of all the members from a common progenitor,—we feel a just degree of astonishment. ”

“ Descent here is clearly maternal, but the form of paternal descent is preserved, a plausible condition for a people who; having become maternal, still stick at least in form to the traditional inheritance from the father. ”

“ Why Children Resemble Parents.—That children reproduce the general and physical and mental characteristics of their parents in combination is unquestionable truth, although the particular mode in which they are communicated is yet undetermined, notwithstanding the fact mentioned by Professor Cope that they are somehow conveyed by the microscopic sperm and germ in the union of which the new being has its beginning. Thus every individual must possess the general characteristics of the primitive human family from which through a vast number of ancestors he has descended. ”

“ Fatherhood may pass through many stages, from a light flitting from one polyandric household to another, on to that form in which the several husbands of the female head of such households must be distinctly related to each other, but, through all the varieties of polyandry, the fixed stake of classification and localization of offspring defines the family outline. ”

“ If we begin with the marriage of father and mother, Cognation will only express the relationship of brothers and sisters; if we take that of the grandfather and grandmother, then uncles, aunts, and their descendants will also be included in the notion of Cognation, and following the same process a larger number of Cognates may be continually obtained by choosing the starting point higher and higher up in the line of ascent. ”

“ From the foregoing discussion on the various laws of inheritance, we learn that the characters of the parents often, or even generally, tend to become developed in the offspring of the same sex, at the same age, and periodically at the same season of the year, in which they first appeared in the parents. ”

“ Owing to the fact that the primary elements or traits of character contributed by each parent may combine in many ways in the embryo, considerable variation in the children of the same parents is inevitable—one child may resemble the father, another the mother, and yet another some near ancestor. ”

“ Offspring Derived from One Parent Only.—So far in our reckoning of heredity we have counted elements from both father and mother, and the complications which arise from such a double ancestry are manifestly very perplexing ones. If we could do away with the elements of sex and find offspring that are derived from one parent only, it would seemingly simplify our problem very much for we should thus have a direct line of descent, free from intermingling. ”

“ The relative influence of the male and female parents upon the characteristics of progeny has long been a fertile subject of discussion among breeders. It is found in experience that progeny sometimes resembles one parent more than the other,—sometimes there is an apparent blending of the characteristics of both,—sometimes a noticeable dissimilarity to either, though always more or less resemblance somewhere, and sometimes, the impress of one may be seen upon a portion of the organization of the offspring and that of the other parent upon another portion ”

“ Thus, of the children of a tall, thin, dark man, and a short, fat, fair woman, some will be like their father, and the others will resemble their mother, or, perhaps, all may "take after" either parent. Sometimes a child appears to be in every respect unlike its parents, and occasionally the likeness of an ancestor appears in a descendant, in whom no resemblance to his immediate progenitors can be detected. ”

“ When the wife becomes pregnant, the eldest brother performs the ceremony of giving the bow and arrow, but the brothers are all equally regarded as the fathers of the child. If one of the brothers leaves the rest and sets up an establishment of his own, it appeared, however, that he might lose his right to be regarded as the father of the children.
If a man is asked the name of his father, he usually gives the name of one man only, even when he is the offspring of a polyandrous marriage. ”

“ There is no difficulty now in explaining the fundamental propositions with which we started, namely, that children resemble their parents. There is no difficulty in the understanding why a child resembles not only its immediate parents, but even its ancestors. There is even no difficulty in understanding why a child should resemble its ancestors, even though it does not resemble its parents. Given the simple truth that the germ-plasm is continuous from one generation to another, all these things become as clear as daylight. ”

“ Younger sons, at the time of their marriage, or at other important periods of life, receive paternal gifts, now more, now less, according to usage, rank, the family fortune, etc., but the bulk of the property belongs to the oldest son, on whom the younger sons look as their father. ”

“ In the classificatory system most of the kin in the same generation are grouped under one general term; e.g., all the males of the grandfather’s generation are called by one term—another term includes father, father’s brothers, father’s male cousins, mother’s sisters’ husbands, mother’s female cousins’ husbands, and so on. ”

“ Normally a child has two parents, four grandparents, and eight great-grandparents. Now, when cousins marry, the great-grandparents of the offspring are reduced to six. The mating of brother and sister cuts the grandparents to two, and the great-grandparents to four. Mating of parent and offspring makes a parent and grandparent identical and likewise eliminates ancestry. Inbreeding means the reduction of the number of branches in the ancestral tree, and this means the reduction of the number of chances to get variation, be they good or bad. ”

“ In the admission of female paternal ancestors, the mother of the more remote male paternal ancestor and her heirs shall be preferred to the mother of the less remote male paternal and her heirs; and, in the case of female maternal ancestors, the mother of the more remote male maternal ancestor shall be preferred to the mother of a less remote male maternal ancestor. ”

“ But a paternalism must have a parent, a royal sire, or a priestly grandmother. In the antique paternalisms there is invariably this parental personality at the top; down beneath it are the puppet children. ”

“ It is a fact that in some countries the father has to purchase the child from its mother; and in the Roman ceremony of the husband raising the baby from the floor we may trace the savage idea that the male parent must formally proclaim his adoption of and responsibility for the offspring. ”

“ In human families, however, there are undoubted cases in which one or more characters of the grandparent reappear in the child which were not in any visible way expressed in the parent, and must therefore have been contained in the parent's germ-plasm in a latent state. ”

“ Usually it is arranged that the first two or three children shall belong to the first husband, and that at a succeeding pregnancy (third or fourth) , another husband shall give the bow and arrow, and, in consequence, become the father not only of that child, but of all succeeding children till some one else gives the bow and arrow. ”

“ The habits of the “much-married” primitive men made mistake about any one’s mother less likely than mistake about his father; and, if in civilised times it is, as the saying goes, a wise child that knows its own father, he was, in barbarous times, a wise father who knew his own child. Examples tracing the kinship through females, father and offspring being never of the same clan, abound in both ancient and modern authorities, and perhaps the most amusing one that can be given is found in Dr. ”

“ On my third supposition, i.e., when the difference between parents has not been great enough to baffle reproduction on the part of the first cross, but when the histories of the father and mother have been, nevertheless, widely different—as in the case of Europeans and Indians—we should expect to have a race of offspring who should seem to be quite clear only about those points, on which their progenitors on both sides were in accord before the manifold divergencies in their experiences commenced; that is to say, the offspring should show a tendency to revert to an early savage condition. ”