Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development
by
Francis Galton
Part 4 out of 6
both, and the first quick impressions that any given word in it may
convey, will differ widely in the two minds.
I took pains to determine as far as feasible the dates of my life at
which each of the associated ideas was first attached to the word.
There were 124 cases in which identification was satisfactory, and
they were distributed as in Table II.
TABLE II.
RELATIVE NUMBER OF ASSOCIATIONS FORMED AT DIFFERENT
PERIODS OF LIFE.
==============+==========================================+==============+
Total number | Occurring | Whose first |
of different |------------------------------------------+ formation |
Associations. | four | three | twice | once | was in |
| times. | times. | | | |
+--------| +-----| +-----| +-----| +-----| |
| per | |per | |per | |per | |per | |
| cent. | |cent.| |cent.| |cent.| |cent.| |
+--------|----+-----+----+-----+---+-----+----+-----+--------------+
48 | 39 | 12 | 10 | 11 | 9 | 9 | 7 | 16 | 13 | boyhood and |
| | | | | | | | | | youth, |
| | | | | | | | | | |
57 | 46 | 10 | 8 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 33 | 26 | subsequent |
| | | | | | | | | | manhood, |
| | | | | | | | | | |
19 | 15 | -- | -- | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 14 | 11 | quite recent |
| | | | | | | | | | events. |
-----+--------|----+-----+----+-----+---+-----+----+-----+--------------+
124 | 100 | 22 | 18 | 23 | 19 |16 | 13 | 63 | 50 | Totals. |
=====+========+=========================================================+
It will be seen from the Table that out of the 48 earliest
associations no less than 12, or one quarter of them, occurred in
each of the four trials; of the 57 associations first formed in
manhood, 10, or about one-sixth of them, had a similar recurrence,
but as to the 19 other associations first formed in quite recent
times, not one of them occurred in the whole of the four trials.
Hence we may see the greater fixity of the earlier associations, and
might measurably determine the decrease of fixity as the date of
their first formation becomes less remote.
The largeness of the number 33 in the middle entry of the last
column but one, which disconcerts the run of the series, is wholly
due to a visual memory of places seen in manhood. I will not speak
about this now, as I shall have to refer to it farther on. Neglecting,
for the moment, this unique class of occurrences, it will be seen
that one-half of the associations date from the period of life
before leaving college; and it may easily be imagined that many of
these refer to common events in an English education. Nay further, on
looking through the list of all the associations it was easy to see
how they are pervaded by purely English ideas, and especially such
as are prevalent in that stratum of English society in which I was
born and bred, and have subsequently lived. In illustration of this,
I may mention an anecdote of a matter which greatly impressed me at
the time. I was staying in a country house with a very pleasant
party of young and old, including persons whose education and
versatility were certainly not below the social average. One evening
we played at a round game, which consisted in each of us drawing as
absurd a scrawl as he or she could, representing some historical
event; the pictures were then shuffled and passed successively from
hand to hand, every one writing down independently their
interpretation of the picture, as to what the historical event was
that the artist intended to depict by the scrawl. I was astonished
at the sameness of our ideas. Cases like Canute and the waves, the
Babes in the Tower, and the like, were drawn by two and even three
persons at the same time, quite independently of one another,
showing how narrowly we are bound by the fetters of our early
education. If the figures in the above Table may be accepted as
fairly correct for the world generally, it shows, still in a
measurable degree, the large effect of early education in fixing our
associations. It will of course be understood that I make no absurd
profession of being able by these very few experiments to lay down
statistical constants of universal application, but that my principal
object is to show that a large class of mental phenomena, that have
hitherto been too vague to lay hold of, admit of being caught by the
firm grip of genuine statistical inquiry. The results that I have
thus far given are hotch-pot results. It is necessary to sort the
materials somewhat before saying more about them.
After several trials I found that the associated ideas admitted
of being divided into three main groups. First there is the imagined
sound of words, as in verbal quotations or names of persons. This
was frequently a mere parrot-like memory which acted instantaneously
and in a meaningless way, just as a machine might act. In the next
group there was every other kind of sense imagery; the chime of
imagined bells, the shiver of remembered cold, the scent of some
particular locality, and, much more frequently than all the rest
put together, visual imagery. The last of the three groups contains
what I will venture, for the want of a better name, to call
"histrionic" representations. It includes those cases where I either
act a part in imagination, or see in imagination a part acted, or,
most commonly by far, where I am both spectator and all the actors
at once, in an imaginary mental theatre. Thus I feel a nascent sense
of some muscular action while I simultaneously witness a puppet of
my brain--a part of myself--perform that action, and I assume a
mental attitude appropriate to the occasion. This, in my case, is a
very frequent way of generalising, indeed I rarely feel that I have
secure hold of a general idea until I have translated it somehow
into this form. Thus the word "abasement" presented itself to me, in
one of my experiments, by my mentally placing myself in a pantomimic
attitude of humiliation with half-closed eyes, bowed head, and
uplifted palms, while at the same time I was aware of myself as of a
mental puppet, in that position. This same word will serve to
illustrate the other groups also. It so happened in connection with
"abasement" that the word "David" or "King David" occurred to me on
one occasion in each of three out of the four trials; also that an
accidental misreading, or perhaps the merely punning association of
the words "a basement," brought up on all four occasions the image
of the foundations of a house that the builders had begun upon.
So much for the character of the association; next as to that of the
words. I found, after the experiments were over, that the words were
divisible into three distinct groups. The first contained "abbey,"
"aborigines," "abyss," and others that admitted of being presented
under some mental image. The second group contained "abasement,"
"abhorrence," "ablution," etc., which admitted excellently of
histrionic representation. The third group contained the more
abstract words, such as "afternoon," "ability," "abnormal," which
were variously and imperfectly dealt with by my mind. I give the
results in the upper part of Table III., and, in order to save
trouble, I have reduced them to percentages in the lower lines of
the Table.
TABLE III.
COMPARISON BETWEEN THE QUALITY OF THE WORDS AND THAT OF
THE IDEAS IN IMMEDIATE ASSOCIATION WITH THEM.
=========================================================================+
Number | | | | | |
of words | | Sense |Histrionic| Purely Verbal | |
in each | |Imagery. | | Names | Phrases | Total|
series. | | | | of | and | |
| | | |Persons.|Quotations.| |
| |---------+----------+--------+-----------+------+
26 |"Abbey" series| 46 | 12 | 32 | 17 | 107 |
20 |"Abasement" " | 25 | 26 | 11 | 17 | 79 |
29 |"Afternoon" " | 23 | 27 | 16 | 38 | 104 |
75 | | | | | | 290 |
| |---------+----------+--------+-----------+------+
|"Abbey" series| 43 | 11 | 30 | 16 | 100 |
|"Abasement" " | 32 | 33 | 13 | 22 | 100 |
|"Afternoon" " | 22 | 25 | 16 | 37 | 100 |
==========================================================================
We see from this that the associations of the "abbey" series are
nearly half of them in sense imagery, and these were almost always
visual. The names of persons also more frequently occurred in this
series than in any other. It will be recollected that in Table II. I
drew attention to the exceptionally large number, 33, in the last
column. It was perhaps 20 in excess of what would have been expected
from the general run of the other figures. This was wholly due to
visual imagery of scenes with which I was first acquainted after
reaching manhood, and shows, I think, that the scenes of childhood
and youth, though vividly impressed on the memory, are by no means
numerous, and may be quite thrown into the background by the
abundance of after experiences; but this, as we have seen, is not the
case with the other forms of association. Verbal memories of old date,
such as Biblical scraps, family expressions, bits of poetry, and the
like, are very numerous, and rise to the thoughts so quickly,
whenever anything suggests them, that they commonly outstrip all
competitors. Associations connected with the "abasement" series are
strongly characterised by histrionic ideas, and by sense imagery,
which to a great degree merges into a histrionic character. Thus the
word "abhorrence" suggested to me, on three out of the four trials,
an image of the attitude of Martha in the famous picture of the
raising of Lazarus by Sebastian del Piombo in the National Gallery.
She stands with averted head, doubly sheltering her face by her hands
from even a sidelong view of the opened grave. Now I could not be
sure how far I saw the picture as such, in my mental view, or how
far I had thrown my own personality into the picture, and was acting
it as actors might act a mystery play, by the puppets of my own brain,
that were parts of myself. As a matter of fact, I entered it under
the heading of sense imagery, but it might very properly have gone
to swell the number of the histrionic entries.
The "afternoon" series suggested a great preponderance of mere catch
words, showing how slowly I was able to realise the meaning of
abstractions; the phrases intruded themselves before the thoughts
became defined. It occasionally occurred that I puzzled wholly over
a word, and made no entry at all; in thirteen cases either this
happened, or else after one idea had occurred the second was too
confused and obscure to admit of record, and mention of it had to be
omitted in the foregoing Table. These entries have forcibly shown to
me the great imperfection in my generalising powers; and I am sure
that most persons would find the same if they made similar trials.
Nothing is a surer sign of high intellectual capacity than the power
of quickly seizing and easily manipulating ideas of a very abstract
nature. Commonly we grasp them very imperfectly, and cling to their
skirts with great difficulty.
In comparing the order in which the ideas presented themselves, I
find that a decided precedence is assumed by the histrionic ideas,
wherever they occur; that verbal associations occur first and with
great quickness on many occasions, but on the whole that they are
only a little more likely to occur first than second; and that
imagery is decidedly more likely to be the second than the first of
the associations called up by a word. In short, gesture-language
appeals the most quickly to my feelings,
It would be very instructive to print the actual records at length,
made by many experimenters, if the records could be clubbed together
and thrown into a statistical form; but it would be too absurd to
print one's own singly. They lay bare the foundations of a man's
thoughts with curious distinctness, and exhibit his mental anatomy
with more vividness and truth than he would probably care to publish
to the world.
It remains to summarise what has been said in the foregoing memoir.
I have desired to show how whole 1 strata of mental operations that
have lapsed out of ordinary consciousness, admit of being dragged
into light, recorded and treated statistically, and how the
obscurity that attends the initial steps of our thoughts can thus be
pierced and dissipated. I then showed measurably the rate at which
associations sprung up, their character, the date of their first
formation, their tendency to recurrence, and their relative
precedence. Also I gave an instance showing how the phenomenon of a
long-forgotten scene, suddenly starting into consciousness, admitted
in many cases of being explained. Perhaps the strongest of the
impressions left by these experiments regards the multifariousness
of the work done by the mind in a state of half-unconsciousness, and
the valid reason they afford for believing in the existence of still
deeper strata of mental operations, sunk wholly below the level of
consciousness, which may account for such mental phenomena as cannot
otherwise be explained. We gain an insight by these experiments into
the marvellous number and nimbleness of our mental associations, and
we also learn that they are very far indeed from being infinite in
their variety. We find that our working stock of ideas is narrowly
limited and that the mind continually recurs to the same instruments
in conducting its operations, therefore its tracks necessarily
become more defined and its flexibility diminished as age advances.
ANTECHAMBER OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
When I am engaged in trying to think anything out, the process of
doing so appears to me to be this: The ideas that lie at any moment
within my full consciousness seem to attract of their own accord the
most appropriate out of a number of other ideas that are lying close
at hand, but imperfectly within the range of my consciousness. There
seems to be a presence-chamber in my mind where full consciousness
holds court, and where two or three ideas are at the same time in
audience, and an antechamber full of more or less allied ideas,
which is situated just beyond the full ken of consciousness. Out of
this antechamber the ideas most nearly allied to those in the
presence-chamber appear to be summoned in a mechanically logical way,
and to have their turn of audience.
The successful progress of thought appears to depend--first, on a
large attendance in the antechamber; secondly, on the presence there
of no ideas except such as are strictly germane to the topic under
consideration; thirdly, on the justness of the logical mechanism
that issues the summons. The thronging of the antechamber is, I am
convinced, altogether beyond my control; if the ideas do not appear,
I cannot create them, nor compel them to come. The exclusion of
alien ideas is accompanied by a sense of mental effort and volition
whenever the topic under consideration is unattractive, otherwise it
proceeds automatically, for if an intruding idea finds nothing to
cling to, it is unable to hold its place in the antechamber, and
slides back again. An animal absorbed in a favourite occupation
shows no sign of painful effort of attention; on the contrary, he
resents interruption that solicits his attention elsewhere. The
consequence of all this is that the mind frequently does good work
without the slightest exertion. In composition it will often produce
a better effect than if it acted with effort, because the essence of
good composition is that the ideas should be connected by the
easiest possible transitions. When a man has been thinking hard and
long upon a subject, he becomes temporarily familiar with certain
steps of thought, certain short cuts, and certain far-fetched
associations, that do not commend themselves to the minds of other
persons, nor indeed to his own at other times; therefore, it is
better that his transitory familiarity with them should have come to
an end before he begins to write or speak. When he returns to the
work after a sufficient pause he is conscious that his ideas have
settled; that is, they have lost their adventitious relations to one
another, and stand in those in which they are likely to reside
permanently in his own mind, and to exist in the minds of others.
Although the brain is able to do very fair work fluently in an
automatic way, and though it will of its own accord strike out
sudden and happy ideas, it is questionable if it is capable of
working thoroughly and profoundly without past or present effort.
The character of this effort seems to me chiefly to lie in bringing
the contents of the antechamber more nearly within the ken of
consciousness, which then takes comprehensive note of all its
contents, and compels the logical faculty to test them _seriatim_
before selecting the fittest for a summons to the presence-chamber.
Extreme fluency and a vivid and rapid imagination are gifts
naturally and healthfully possessed by those who rise to be great
orators or literary men, for they could not have become successful
in those careers without it. The curious fact already alluded to of
five editors of newspapers being known to me as having phantasmagoria,
points to a connection between two forms of fluency, the literary
and the visual. Fluency may be also a morbid faculty, being markedly
increased by alcohol (as poets are never tired of telling us), and
by various drugs; and it exists in delirium, insanity, and states of
high emotions. The fluency of a vulgar scold is extraordinary.
In preparing to write or speak upon a subject of which the details
have been mastered, I gather, after some inquiry, that the usual
method among persons who have the gift of fluency is to think
cursorily on topics connected with it, until what I have called the
antechamber is well filled with cognate ideas. Then, to allow the
ideas to link themselves in their own way, breaking the linkage
continually and recommencing afresh until some line of thought has
suggested itself that appears from a rapid and light glance to
thread the chief topics together. After this the connections are
brought step by step fully into consciousness, they are
short-circuited here and extended there, as found advisable until a
firm connection is found to be established between all parts of the
subject. After this is done the mental effort is over, and the
composition may proceed fluently in an automatic way. Though this, I
believe, is a usual way, it is by no means universal, for there are
very great differences in the conditions under which different
persons compose most readily. They seem to afford as good evidence
of the variety of mental and bodily constitutions as can be met with
in any other line of inquiry.
It is very reasonable to think that part at least of the inward
response to spiritual yearnings is of similar origin to the visions,
thoughts, and phrases that arise automatically when the mind has
prepared itself to receive them. The devout man attunes his mind to
holy ideas, he excludes alien thoughts, and he waits and watches in
stillness. Gradually the darkness is lifted, the silence of the mind
is broken, and the spiritual responses are heard in the way so often
described by devout men of all religions. This seems to me precisely
analogous to the automatic presentation of ordinary ideas to orators
and literary men, and to the visions of which I spoke in the chapter
on that subject. Dividuality replaces individuality, and one portion
of the mind communicates with another portion as with a different
person.
Some persons and races are naturally more imaginative than others,
and show their visionary tendency in every one of the respects named.
They are fanciful, oratorical, poetical, and credulous. The
"enthusiastic" faculties all seem to hang together; I shall recur to
this in the chapter on enthusiasm.
I have already pointed out the existence of a morbid form of piety:
there is also a morbid condition of apparent inspiration to which
imaginative women are subject, especially those who suffer more or
less from hysteria. It is accompanied in a very curious way,
familiar to medical men, by almost incredible acts of deceit. It is
found even in ladies of position apparently above the suspicion of
vulgar fraud, and seems associated with a strange secret desire to
attract notice. Ecstatics, seers of visions, and devout fasting
girls who eat on the sly, often belong to this category.
EARLY SENTIMENTS.
The child is passionately attached to his home, then to his school,
his country, and religion; yet how entirely the particular home,
school, country, and religion are a matter of accident! He is born
prepared to attach himself as a climbing plant is naturally disposed
to climb, the kind of stick being of little importance. The models
upon whom the child or boy forms himself are the boys or men whom he
has been thrown amongst, and whom from some incidental cause he may
have learned to love and respect. The every-day utterances, the
likes and dislikes of his parents, their social and caste feelings,
their religious persuasions are absorbed by him; their views or
those of his teachers become assimilated and made his own. If a
mixed marriage should have taken place, and the father should die
while the children are yet young, and if a question arise between
the executors of his will and the mother as to the religious
education of the children, application is made as a matter of course
to the Court of Chancery, who decide that the children shall be
brought up as Protestants or as Catholics as the case may be, or the
sons one way and the daughters the other; and they are, and usually
remain so afterwards when free to act for themselves.
It is worthy of note that many of the deaf-mutes who are first
taught to communicate freely with others after they had passed the
period of boyhood, and are asked about their religious feelings up
to that time, are reported to tell the same story. They say that the
meaning of the church service whither they had accompanied their
parents, and of the kneeling to pray, had been absolutely
unintelligible, and a standing puzzle to them. The ritual touched no
chord in their untaught natures that responded in unison. Very much
of what we fondly look upon as a natural religious sentiment is
purely traditional.
The word religion may fairly be applied to any group of sentiments
or persuasions that are strong enough to bind us to do that which
we intellectually may acknowledge to be our duty, and the possession
of some form of religion in this larger sense of the word is of the
utmost importance to moral stability. The sentiments must be strong
enough to make us ashamed at the mere thought of committing, and
distressed during the act of committing any untruth, or any
uncharitable act, or of neglecting what we feel to be right, in
order to indulge in laziness or gratify some passing desire. So long
as experience shows the religion to be competent to produce this
effect, it seems reasonable to believe that the particular dogma is
comparatively of little importance. But as the dogma or sentiments,
whatever they be, if they are not naturally instinctive, must be
ingrained in the character to produce their full effect, they should
be instilled early in life and allowed to grow unshaken until their
roots are firmly fixed. The consciousness of this fact makes the
form of religious teaching in every church and creed identical in
one important particular though its substance may vary in every
respect. In subjects unconnected with sentiment, the freest inquiry
and the fullest deliberation are required before it is thought
decorous to form a final opinion; but wherever sentiment is involved,
and especially in questions of religious dogma, about which there is
more sentiment and more difference of opinion among wise, virtuous,
and truth-seeking men than about any other subject whatever,
free inquiry is peremptorily discouraged. The religious instructor
in every creed is one who makes it his profession to saturate his
pupils with prejudice. A vast and perpetual clamour arises from the
pulpits of endless proselytising sects throughout this great empire,
the priests of all of them crying with one consent, "This is the way,
shut your ears to the words of those who teach differently; don't
look at their books, do not even mention their names except to scoff
at them; they are damnable. Have faith in what I tell you, and save
your souls!" In which of these conflicting doctrines are we to place
our faith if we are not to hear all sides, and to rely upon our own
judgment in the end? Are we to understand that it is the duty of man
to be credulous in accepting whatever the priest in whose
neighbourhood he happens to reside may say? Is it to believe
whatever his parents may have lovingly taught him? There are a vast
number of foolish men and women in the world who marry and have
children, and because they deal lovingly with their children it does
not at all follow that they can instruct them wisely. Or is it to
have faith in what the wisest men of all ages have found peace in
believing? The Catholic phrase, "_quod semper quod ubique quod
omnibus_"--"that which has been believed at all times, in all places,
and by all men"--has indeed a fine rolling sound, but where is the
dogma that satisfies its requirements? Or is it, such and such
really good and wise men with whom you are acquainted, and whom, it
may be, you have the privilege of knowing, have lived consistent
lives through the guidance of these dogmas, how can you who are many
grades their inferior in good works, in capacity and in experience,
presume to set up your opinion against theirs? The reply is, that it
is a matter of history and notoriety that other very good, capable,
and inexperienced men have led and are leading consistent lives
under the guidance of totally different dogmas, and that some of
them a few generations back would have probably burned your modern
hero as a heretic if he had lived in their times and they could have
got hold of him. Also, that men, however eminent in goodness,
intellect, and experience, may be deeply prejudiced, and that their
judgment in matters where their prejudices are involved cannot
thenceforward be trusted. Watches, as electricians know to their cost,
are liable to have their steel work accidentally magnetised, and the
best chronometer under those conditions can never again be trusted
to keep correct time.
Lastly, we are told to have faith in our conscience? well we know
now a great deal more about conscience than formerly. Ethnologists
have studied the manifestations of conscience in different people,
and do not find that they are consistent. Conscience is now known to
be partly transmitted by inheritance in the way and under the
conditions clearly explained by Mr. Darwin, and partly to be an
unsuspected result of early education. The value of inherited
conscience lies in its being the organised result of the social
experiences of many generations, but it fails in so far as it
expresses the experience of generations whose habits differed from
our own. The doctrine of evolution shows that no race can be in
perfect harmony with its surroundings; the latter are continually
changing, while the organism of the race hobbles after, vainly
trying to overtake them. Therefore the inherited part of conscience
cannot be an infallible guide, and the acquired part of it may,
under the influence of dogma, be a very bad one. The history of
fanaticism shows too clearly that this is not only a theory but a
fact. Happy the child, especially in these inquiring days, who has
been taught a religion that mainly rests on the moral obligations
between man and man in domestic and national life, and which, so far
as it is necessarily dogmatic, rests chiefly upon the proper
interpretation of facts about which there is no dispute,--namely, on
those habitual occurrences which are always open to observation, and
which form the basis of so-called natural religion.
It would be instructive to make a study of the working religion of
good and able men of all nations, in order to discover the real
motives by which they were severally animated,--men, I mean, who had
been tried by both prosperity and adversity, and had borne the test;
who, while they led lives full of interest to themselves, were
beloved by their own family, noted among those with whom they had
business relations for their probity and conciliatory ways, and
honoured by a wider circle for their unselfish furtherance of the
public good. Such men exist of many faiths and in many races.
Another interesting and cognate inquiry would be into the motives
that have sufficed to induce men who were leading happy lives, to
meet death willingly at a time when they were not particularly
excited. Probably the number of instances to be found, say among
Mussulmans, who are firm believers in the joys of Mahomet's Paradise,
would not be more numerous than among the Zulus, who have no belief
in any paradise at all, but are influenced by martial honour and
patriotism. There is an Oriental phrase, as I have been told, that
the fear of the inevitable approach of death is a European malady.
Terror at any object is quickly taught if it is taught consistently,
whether the terror be reasonable or not. There are few more stupid
creatures than fish, but they notoriously soon learn to be
frightened at any newly-introduced method of capture, say by an
artificial fly, which, at first their comrades took greedily. Some
one fish may have seen others caught, and have learned to take fright
at the fly. Whenever he saw it again he would betray his terror by
some instinctive gesture, which would be seen and understood by
others, and so instruction in distrusting the fly appears to spread.
All gregarious animals are extremely quick at learning terrors from
one another. It is a condition of their existence that they should
do so, as was explained at length in a previous chapter. Their
safety lies in mutual intelligence and support. When most of them
are browsing a few are always watching, and at the least signal of
alarm the whole herd takes fright simultaneously. Gregarious animals
are quickly alive to their mutual signals; it is beautiful to watch
great flocks of birds as they wheel in their flight and suddenly
show the flash of all their wings against the sky, as they
simultaneously and suddenly change their direction. Much of the
tameness or wildness of an animal's character is probably due to the
placidity or to the frequent starts of alarm of the mother while she
was rearing it. I was greatly struck with some evidence I happened
to meet with, of the pervading atmosphere of alarm and suspicion in
which the children of criminal parents are brought up, and which, in
combination with their inherited disposition, makes them, in the
opinion of many observers, so different to other children. The
evidence of which I speak lay in the tone of letters sent by
criminal parents to their children, who were inmates of the Princess
Mary Village Homes, from which I had the opportunity, thanks to the
kindness of the Superintendent, Mrs. Meredith, of hearing and seeing
extracts. They were full of such phrases as "Mind you do not say
anything about this," though the matters referred to were, to all
appearance, unimportant.
The writings of Dante on the horrible torments of the damned, and
the realistic pictures of the same subject in frescoes and other
pictures of the same date, showing the flames and the flesh hooks
and the harrows, indicate the transforming effect of those cruel
times, fifteen generations ago, upon the disposition of men. Revenge
and torture had been so commonly practised by rulers that they seemed
to be appropriate attributes of every high authority, and the
artists of those days saw no incongruity in supposing that a
supremely powerful master, however beneficent he might be, would
make the freest use of them.
Aversion is taught as easily as terror, when the object of it is
neutral and not especially attractive to an unprejudiced taste. I
can testify in my own person to the somewhat rapidly-acquired and
long-retained fancies concerning the clean and unclean, upon which
Jews and Mussulmans lay such curious stress. It was the result of my
happening to spend a year in the East, at an age when the brain is
very receptive of new ideas, and when I happened to be much
impressed by the nobler aspects of Mussulman civilisation, especially,
I may say, with the manly conformity of their every-day practice to
their creed, which contrasts sharply with what we see among most
Europeans, who profess extreme unworldliness and humiliation on one
day of the week, and act in a worldly and masterful manner during
the remaining six. Although many years have passed since that time, I
still find the old feelings in existence--for instance, that of
looking on the left hand as unclean.
It is difficult to an untravelled Englishman, who has not had an
opportunity of throwing himself into the spirit of the East, to
credit the disgust and detestation that numerous every-day acts,
which appear perfectly harmless to his countrymen, excite in many
Orientals.
To conclude, the power of nurture is very great in implanting
sentiments of a religious nature, of terror and of aversion, and in
giving a fallacious sense of their being natural instincts. But it
will be observed that the circumstances from which these influences
proceed, affect large classes simultaneously, forming a kind of
atmosphere in which every member of them passes his life. They
produce the cast of mind that distinguishes an Englishman from a
foreigner, and one class of Englishman from another, but they have
little influence in creating the differences that exist between
individuals of the same class.
HISTORY OF TWINS.
The exceedingly close resemblance attributed to twins has been the
subject of many novels and plays, and most persons have felt a
desire to know upon what basis of truth those works of fiction may
rest. But twins have a special claim upon our attention; it is, that
their history affords means of distinguishing between the effects of
tendencies received at birth, and of those that were imposed by the
special circumstances of their after lives. The objection to
statistical evidence in proof of the inheritance of peculiar
faculties has always been: "The persons whom you compare may have
lived under similar social conditions and have had similar
advantages of education, but such prominent conditions are only a
small part of those that determine the future of each man's life. It
is to trifling accidental circumstances that the bent of his
disposition and his success are mainly due, and these you leave
wholly out of account--in fact, they do not admit of being tabulated,
and therefore your statistics, however plausible at first sight, are
really of very little use." No method of inquiry which I had
previously been able to carry out--and I have tried many methods--is
wholly free from this objection. I have therefore attacked the
problem from the opposite side, seeking for some new method by which
it would be possible to weigh in just scales the effects of Nature
and Nurture, and to ascertain their respective shares in framing the
disposition and intellectual ability of men. The life-history of
twins supplies what I wanted. We may begin by inquiring about twins
who were closely alike in boyhood and youth, and who were educated
together for many years, and learn whether they subsequently grew
unlike, and, if so, what the main causes were which, in the opinion
of the family, produced the dissimilarity. In this way we can obtain
direct evidence of the kind we want. Again, we may obtain yet more
valuable evidence by a converse method. We can inquire into the
history of twins who were exceedingly unlike in childhood, and learn
how far their characters became assimilated under the influence of
identical nurture, inasmuch as they had the same home, the same
teachers, the same associates, and in every other respect the same
surroundings.
My materials were obtained by sending circulars of inquiry to
persons who were either twins themselves or near relations of twins.
The printed questions were in thirteen groups; the last of them
asked for the addresses of other twins known to the recipient, who
might be likely to respond if I wrote to them. This happily led to a
continually widening circle of correspondence, which I pursued until
enough material was accumulated for a general reconnaisance of the
subject.
There is a large literature relating to twins in their purely
surgical and physiological aspect. The reader interested in this
should consult _Die Lehre von den Zwillingen_, von L. Kleinwaechter,
Prag. 1871. It is full of references, but it is also unhappily
disfigured by a number of numerical misprints, especially in page 26.
I have not found any book that treats of twins from my present point
of view.
The reader will easily understand that the word "twins" is a vague
expression, which covers two very dissimilar events--the one
corresponding to the progeny of animals that usually bear more than
one at a birth, each of the progeny being derived from a separate
ovum, while the other event is due to the development of two
germinal spots in the same ovum. In the latter case they are
enveloped in the same membrane, and all such twins are found
invariably to be of the same sex. The consequence of this is, that I
find a curious discontinuity in my results. One would have expected
that twins would commonly be found to possess a certain average
likeness to one another; that a few would greatly exceed that
average likeness, and a few would greatly fall short of it. But this
is not at all the case. Extreme similarity and extreme dissimilarity
between twins of the same sex are nearly as common as moderate
resemblance. When the twins are a boy and a girl, they are never
closely alike; in fact, their origin is never due to the development
of two germinal spots in the same ovum.
I received about eighty returns of cases of close similarity,
thirty-five of which entered into many instructive details. In a few
of these not a single point of difference could be specified. In the
remainder, the colour of the hair and eyes were almost always
identical; the height, weight, and strength were nearly so.
Nevertheless, I have a few cases of a notable difference in height,
weight, and strength, although the resemblance was otherwise very
near. The manner and personal address of the thirty-five pairs of
twins are usually described as very similar, but accompanied by a
slight difference of expression, familiar to near relatives, though
unperceived by strangers. The intonation of the voice when speaking
is commonly the same, but it frequently happens that the twins sing
in different keys. Most singularly, the one point in which
similarity is rare is the handwriting. I cannot account for this,
considering how strongly handwriting runs in families, but I am sure
of the fact. I have only one case in which nobody, not even the twins
themselves, could distinguish their own notes of lectures, etc.;
barely two or three in which the handwriting was undistinguishable
by others, and only a few in which it was described as closely alike.
On the other hand, I have many in which it is stated to be unlike,
and some in which it is alluded to as the only point of difference.
It would appear that the handwriting is a very delicate test of
difference in organisation--a conclusion which I commend to the
notice of enthusiasts in the art of discovering character by the
handwriting.
One of my inquiries was for anecdotes regarding mistakes made
between the twins by their near relatives. The replies are numerous,
but not very varied in character. When the twins are children, they
are usually distinguished by ribbons tied round the wrist or neck;
nevertheless the one is sometimes fed, physicked, and whipped by
mistake for the other, and the description of these little domestic
catastrophes was usually given by the mother, in a phraseology that
is somewhat touching by reason of its seriousness. I have one case
in which a doubt remains whether the children were not changed in
their bath, and the presumed A is not really B, and _vice versa_. In
another case, an artist was engaged on the portraits of twins who
were between three and four years of age; he had to lay aside his
work for three weeks, and, on resuming it, could not tell to which
child the respective likenesses he had in hand belonged. The
mistakes become less numerous on the part of the mother during the
boyhood and girlhood of the twins, but are almost as frequent as
before on the part of strangers. I have many instances of tutors
being unable to distinguish their twin pupils. Two girls used
regularly to impose on their music teacher when one of them wanted a
whole holiday; they had their lessons at separate hours, and the one
girl sacrificed herself to receive two lessons on the same day,
while the other one enjoyed herself from morning to evening. Here is
a brief and comprehensive account:--
"Exactly alike in all, their schoolmasters never could tell them
apart; at dancing parties they constantly changed partners without
discovery; their close resemblance is scarcely diminished by age."
The following is a typical schoolboy anecdote:--
"Two twins were fond of playing tricks, and complaints were
frequently made; but the boys would never own which was the guilty
one, and the complainants were never certain which of the two he was.
One head master used to say he would never flog the innocent for the
guilty, and another used to flog both."
No less than nine anecdotes have reached me of a twin seeing his or
her reflection in a looking-glass, and addressing it in the belief
it was the other twin in person.
I have many anecdotes of mistakes when the twins were nearly grown up.
Thus:--
"Amusing scenes occurred at college when one twin came to visit the
other; the porter on one occasion refusing to let the visitor out of
the college gates, for, though they stood side by side, he professed
ignorance as to which he ought to allow to depart."
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 marvellous 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."
I have four or five instances of doubt during an engagement of
marriage. Thus:--
"A married first, but both twins met the lady together for the first
time, and fell in love with her there and then. A managed to see her
home and to gain her affection, though B went sometimes courting in
his place, and neither the lady nor her parents could tell which was
which."
I have also a German letter, written in quaint terms, about twin
brothers who married sisters, but could not easily be distinguished
by them.[13] In the well-known novel by Mr. Wilkie Collins of
_Poor Miss Finch_, the blind girl distinguishes the twin she loves
by the touch of his hand, which gives her a thrill that the touch of
the other brother does not. Philosophers have not, I believe, as yet
investigated the conditions of such thrills; but I have a case in
which Miss Finch's test would have failed. Two persons, both friends
of a certain twin lady, told me that she had frequently remarked to
them that "kissing her twin sister was not like kissing her other
sisters, but like kissing herself--her own hand, for example."
It would be an interesting experiment for twins who were closely
alike to try how far dogs could distinguish them by scent.
[Footnote 13: I take this opportunity of withdrawing an anecdote,
happily of no great importance, published in _Men of Science_, p. 14,
about a man personating his twin brother for a joke at supper, and
not being discovered by his wife. It was told me on good authority;
but I have reason to doubt the fact, as the story is not known to
the son of one of the twins. However, the twins in question were
extraordinarily alike, and I have many anecdotes about them sent me
by the latter gentleman.]
I have a few anecdotes of strange mistakes made between twins in
adult life. Thus, an officer writes:--
"On one occasion when I returned from foreign service my father
turned to me and said, 'I thought you were in London,' thinking I
was my brother--yet he had not seen me for nearly four years--our
resemblance was so great."
The next and last anecdote I shall give is, perhaps, the most
remarkable of those I have; it was sent me by the brother of the
twins, who were in middle life at the time of its occurrence:--
"A was again coming home from India, on leave; the ship did not
arrive for some days after it was due; the twin brother B had come
up from his quarters to receive A, and their old mother was very
nervous. One morning A rushed in saying, 'Oh, mother, how are you?'
Her answer was, 'No, B, it's a bad joke; you know how anxious I am!'
and it was a little time before A could persuade her that he was the
real man."
Enough has been said to prove that an extremely close personal
resemblance frequently exists between twins of the same sex; and that,
although the resemblance usually diminishes as they grow into
manhood and womanhood, some cases occur in which the diminution of
resemblance is hardly perceptible. It must be borne in mind that it
is not necessary to ascribe the divergence of development, when it
occurs, to the effect of different nurtures, but it is quite
possible that it may be due to the late appearance of qualities
inherited at birth, though dormant in early life, like gout. To this
I shall recur.
There is a curious feature in the character of the resemblance
between twins, which has been alluded to by a few correspondents; it
is well illustrated by the following quotations. A mother of twins
says:--
"There seemed to be a sort of interchangeable likeness in expression,
that often gave to each the effect of being more like his brother
than himself."
Again, two twin brothers, writing to me, after analysing their
points of resemblance, which are close and numerous, and pointing
out certain shades of difference, add--
"These seem to have marked us through life, though for a while, when
we were first separated, the one to go to business, and the other to
college, our respective characters were inverted; we both think that
at that time we each ran into the character of the other. The proof
of this consists in our own recollections, in our correspondence by
letter, and in the views which we then took of matters in which we
were interested."
In explanation of this apparent interchangeableness, we must
recollect that no character is simple, and that in twins who
strongly resemble each other, every expression in the one may be
matched by a corresponding expression in the other, but it does not
follow that the same expression should be the prevalent one in both
cases. Now it is by their prevalent expressions that we should
distinguish between the twins; consequently when one twin has
temporarily the expression which is the prevalent one in his brother,
he is apt to be mistaken for him. There are also cases where the
development of the two twins is not strictly _pari passu_; they
reach the same goal at the same time, but not by identical stages.
Thus: A is born the larger, then B overtakes and surpasses A, and is
in his turn overtaken by A, the end being that the twins, on
reaching adult life, are of the same size. This process would aid in
giving an interchangeable likeness at certain periods of their growth,
and is undoubtedly due to nature more frequently than to nurture.
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. One twin writes that
she and her sister "have both the defect of not being able to come
downstairs quickly, which, however, was not born with them, but came
on at the age of twenty." Three pairs of twins have peculiarities in
their fingers; in one case it consists in a slight congenital
flexure of one of the joints of the little finger; it was inherited
from a grandmother, but neither parents, nor brothers, nor sisters
show the least trace of it. In another case the twins have a
peculiar way of bending the fingers, and there was a faint tendency
to the same peculiarity in the mother, but in her alone of all the
family. In a third case, about which I made a few inquiries, which
is given by Mr. Darwin, but is not included in my returns, there was
no known family tendency to the peculiarity which was observed in
the twins of having a crooked little finger. In another pair of twins,
one was born ruptured, and the other became so at six months old.
Two twins at the age of twenty-three were attacked by toothache, and
the same tooth had to be extracted in each case. There are curious
and close correspondences mentioned in the falling off of the hair.
Two cases are mentioned of death from the same disease; one of which
is very affecting. The outline of the story was that the twins were
closely alike and singularly attached, and had identical tastes;
they both obtained Government clerkships, and kept house together,
when one sickened and died of Bright's disease, and the other also
sickened of the same disease and died seven months later.
Both twins were 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. This
implies so intimate a constitutional resemblance, that it is proper
to give some quotations in evidence. Thus, the father of two twins
says:--
"Their general health is closely alike; whenever one of them has an
illness, the other invariably has the same within a day or two, and
they usually recover in the same order. Such has been the case with
whooping-cough, chicken-pox, and measles; also with slight bilious
attacks, which they have successively. Latterly, they had a feverish
attack at the same time."
Another parent of twins says:--
"If anything ails one of them, identical symptoms _nearly always_
appear in the other; this has been singularly visible in two
instances during the last two months. Thus, when in London, one fell
ill with a violent attack of dysentery, and within twenty-four hours
the other had precisely the same symptoms."
A medical man writes of twins with whom he is well acquainted:--
"Whilst I knew them, for a period of two years, there was not the
slightest tendency towards a difference in body or mind; external
influences seemed powerless to produce any dissimilarity."
The mother of two other twins, after describing how they were ill
simultaneously up to the age of fifteen, adds, that they shed their
first milk-teeth within a few hours of each other.
Trousseau has a very remarkable case (in the chapter on Asthma) in
his important work _Clinique M. edicale_. (In the edition of 1873 it
is in vol. ii. p. 473.) It was quoted at length in the original
French, in Mr. Darwin's _Variation under Domestication_, vol. ii. p.
252. The following is a translation:--
"I attended twin brothers so extraordinarily alike, that it was
impossible for me to tell which was which, without seeing them side
by side. But their physical likeness extended still deeper, for they
had, so to speak, a yet more remarkable pathological resemblance.
Thus, one of them, whom I saw at the Neothermes at Paris, suffering
from rheumatic ophthalmia, said to me, 'At this instant my brother
must be having an ophthalmia like mine;' and, as I had exclaimed
against such an assertion, he showed me a few days afterwards a
letter just received by him from his brother, who was at that time
at Vienna, and who expressed himself in these words--'I have my
ophthalmia; you must be having yours.' However singular this story
may appear, the fact is none the less exact; it has not been told to
me by others, but I have seen it myself; and I have seen other
analogous cases in my practice. These twins were also asthmatic, and
asthmatic to a frightful degree. Though born in Marseilles, they
were never able to stay in that town, where their business affairs
required them to go, without having an attack. Still more strange,
it was sufficient for them to get away only as far as Toulon in
order to be cured of the attack caught at Marseilles. They travelled
continually, and in all countries, on business affairs, and they
remarked that certain localities were extremely hurtful to them, and
that in others they were free from all asthmatic symptoms."
I do not like to pass over here a most dramatic tale in the
_Psychologie Morbide_ of Dr. J. Moreau (de Tours), M. edecin de
l'Hospice de Bicetre. Paris, 1859, p. 172. He speaks "of two twin
brothers who had been confined, on account of monomania, at Bicetre":--
"Physically the two young men are so nearly alike that the one is
easily mistaken for the other. Morally, their resemblance is no less
complete, and is most remarkable in its details. Thus, their
dominant ideas are absolutely the same. They both consider
themselves subject to imaginary persecutions; the same enemies have
sworn their destruction, and employ the same means to effect it.
Both have hallucinations of hearing. They are both of them
melancholy and morose; they never address a word to anybody, and
will hardly answer the questions that others address to them. They
always keep apart, and never communicate with one another. An
extremely curious fact which has been frequently noted by the
superintendents of their section of the hospital, and by myself, is
this: From time to time, at very irregular intervals of two, three,
and many months, without appreciable cause, and by the purely
spontaneous effect of their illness, a very marked change takes
place in the condition of the two brothers. Both of them, at the
same time, and often on the same day, rouse themselves from their
habitual stupor and prostration; they make the same complaints, and
they come of their own accord to the physician, with an urgent
request to be liberated. I have seen this strange thing occur, even
when they were some miles apart, the one being at Bicetre, and the
other living at Saint-Anne."
I sent a copy of this passage to the principal authorities among the
physicians to the insane in England, asking if they had ever
witnessed any similar case. In reply, I have received three
noteworthy instances, but none to be compared in their exact
parallelism with that just given. The details of these three cases
are painful, and it is not necessary to my general purpose that I
should further allude to them.
There is another curious French case of insanity in twins, which was
pointed out to me by Sir James Paget, described by Dr. Baume in the
_Annales M. edico-Psychologiques_, 4 serie, vol. i., 1863, p. 312,
of which the following is an abstract. The original contains a few
more details, but is too long to quote: Francois and Martin, fifty
years of age, worked as railroad contractors between Quimper and
Chateaulin. Martin had twice slight attacks of insanity. On January 15
a box was robbed in which the twins had deposited their savings. On
the night of January 23-24 both Francois (who lodged at Quimper) and
Martin (who lived with his wife and children at St. Lorette, two
leagues from Quimper) had the same dream at the same hour, three a.m.,
and both awoke with a violent start, calling out, "I have caught the
thief! I have caught the thief! they are doing mischief to my brother!"
They were both of them extremely agitated, and gave way to similar
extravagances, dancing and leaping.
Martin sprang on his grandchild, declaring that he was the thief,
and would have strangled him if he had not been prevented; he then
became steadily worse, complained of violent pains in his head, went
out of doors on some excuse, and tried to drown himself in the river
Steir, but was forcibly stopped by his son, who had watched and
followed him. He was then taken to an asylum by gendarmes, where he
died in three hours. Francois, on his part, calmed down on the
morning of the 24th, and employed the day in inquiring about the
robbery. By a strange chance, he crossed his brother's path at the
moment when the latter was struggling with the gendarmes; then he
himself became maddened, giving way to extravagant gestures and using
incoherent language (similar to that of his brother). He then asked
to be bled, which was done, and afterwards, declaring himself to be
better, went out on the pretext of executing some commission, but
really to drown himself in the River Steir, which he actually did,
at the very spot where Martin had attempted to do the same thing a
few hours previously.
The next point which I shall mention in illustration of the
extremely close resemblance between certain twins is the similarity
in the association of their ideas. No less than eleven out of the
thirty-five cases testify to this. They make the same remarks on the
same occasion, begin singing the same song at the same moment, and
so on; or one would commence a sentence, and the other would finish
it. An observant friend graphically described to me the effect
produced on her by two such twins whom she had met casually. She said:
"Their teeth grew alike, they spoke alike and together, and said the
same things, and seemed just like one person." One of the most
curious anecdotes that I have received concerning this similarity of
ideas was that one twin, A, who happened to be at a town in Scotland,
bought a set of champagne glasses which caught his attention, as a
surprise for his brother B; while, at the same time, B, being in
England, bought a similar set of precisely the same pattern as a
surprise for A. Other anecdotes of a like kind have reached me about
these twins.
The last point to which I shall allude regards the tastes and
dispositions of the thirty-five pairs of twins. In sixteen
cases--that is, in nearly one-half of them--these were described as
closely similar; in the remaining nineteen they were much alike, but
subject to certain named differences. These differences belonged
almost wholly to such groups of qualities as these: The one was the
more vigorous, fearless, energetic; the other was gentle, clinging,
and timid; or the one was more ardent, the other more calm and placid;
or again, the one was the more independent, original, and
self-contained; the other the more generous, hasty, and vivacious.
In short, the difference was that of intensity or energy in one or
other of its protean forms; it did not extend more deeply into the
structure of the characters. The more vivacious might be subdued by
ill health, until he assumed the character of the other; or the
latter might be raised by excellent health to that of the former.
The difference was in the key-note, not in the melody.
It follows from what has been said concerning the similar
dispositions of the twins, the similarity in the associations of
their ideas, of their special ailments, and of their illnesses
generally, that the resemblances are not superficial, but extremely
intimate. I have only two cases of a strong bodily resemblance being
accompanied by mental diversity, and one case only of the converse
kind. It must be remembered that the conditions which govern extreme
likeness between twins are not the same as those between ordinary
brothers and sisters, and that it would be incorrect to conclude
from what has just been said about the twins that mental and bodily
likeness are invariably co-ordinate, such being by no means the case.
We are now in a position to understand that the phrase "close
similarity" is no exaggeration, and to realise the value of the
evidence I am about to adduce. Here are thirty-five cases of twins
who were "closely alike" in body and mind when they were young, and
who have been reared exactly alike up to their early manhood and
womanhood. Since then the conditions of their lives have changed;
what change of Nurture has produced the most variation?
It was with no little interest that I searched the records of the
thirty-five cases for an answer; and they gave an answer that was
not altogether direct, but it was distinct, and not at all what I
had expected. They showed me that in some cases the resemblance of
body and mind had continued unaltered up to old age, notwithstanding
very different conditions of life; and they showed in the other
cases that the parents ascribed such dissimilarity as there was,
wholly or almost wholly to some form of illness. In four cases it
was scarlet fever; in a fifth, typhus; in a sixth, a slight effect
was ascribed to a nervous fever; in a seventh it was the effect of
an Indian climate; in an eighth, an illness (unnamed) of nine
months' duration; in a ninth, varicose veins; in a tenth, a bad
fracture of the leg, which prevented all active exercise afterwards;
and there were three additional instances of undefined forms of ill
health. It will be sufficient to quote one of the returns; in this
the father writes:
"At birth they were _exactly_ alike, except that one was born with a
bad varicose affection, the effect of which had been to prevent any
violent exercise, such as dancing or running, and, as she has grown
older, to make her more serious and thoughtful. Had it not been for
this infirmity, I think the two would have been as exactly alike as
it is possible for two women to be, both mentally and physically;
even now they are constantly mistaken for one another."
In only a very few cases is some allusion made to the dissimilarity
being partly due to the combined action of many small influences,
and in none of the thirty-five cases is it largely, much less wholly,
ascribed to that cause. In not a single instance have I met with a
word about the growing dissimilarity being due to the action of the
firm free-will of one or both of the twins, which had triumphed over
natural tendencies; and yet a large proportion of my correspondents
happen to be clergymen, whose bent of mind is opposed, as I feel
assured from the tone of their letters, to a necessitarian view of
life.
It has been remarked that a growing diversity between twins may be
ascribed to the tardy development of naturally diverse qualities;
but we have a right, upon the evidence I have received, to go
farther than this. We have seen that a few twins retain their close
resemblance through life; in other words, instances do exist of an
apparently thorough similarity of nature, in which such difference
of external circumstances as may be consistent with the ordinary
conditions of the same social rank and country do not create
dissimilarity. Positive evidence, such as this, cannot be outweighed
by any amount of negative evidence. Therefore, in those cases where
there is a growing diversity, and where no external cause can be
assigned either by the twins themselves or by their family for it,
we may feel sure that it must be chiefly or altogether due to a want
of thorough similarity in their nature. Nay, further, in some cases
it is distinctly affirmed that the growing dissimilarity can be
accounted for in no other way. We may, therefore, broadly conclude
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 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. Nature is far stronger than Nurture within the limited
range that I have been careful to assign to the latter.
The effect of illness, as shown by these replies, is great, and well
deserves further consideration. It appears that the constitution of
youth is not so elastic as we are apt to think, but that an attack,
say of scarlet fever, leaves a permanent mark, easily to be measured
by the present method of comparison. This recalls an impression made
strongly on my mind several years ago, by the sight of some curves
drawn by a mathematical friend. He took monthly measurements of the
circumference of his children's heads during the first few years of
their lives, and he laid down the successive measurements on the
successive lines of a piece of ruled paper, by taking the edge of
the paper as a base. He then joined the free ends of the lines, and
so obtained a curve of growth. These curves had, on the whole, that
regularity of sweep that might have been expected, but each of them
showed occasional halts, like the landing-places on a long flight of
stairs. The development had been arrested by something, and was not
made up for by after growth. Now, on the same piece of paper my
friend had also registered the various infantile illnesses of the
children, and corresponding to each illness was one of these halts.
There remained no doubt in my mind that, if these illnesses had been
warded off, the development of the children would have been
increased by almost the precise amount lost in these halts. In other
words, the disease had drawn largely upon the capital, and not only
on the income, of their constitutions. I hope these remarks may
induce some men of science to repeat similar experiments on their
children of the future. They may compress two years of a child's
history on one side of a ruled half-sheet of foolscap paper, if they
cause each successive line to stand for a successive month,
beginning from the birth of the child; and if they economise space
by laying, not the 0-inch division of the tape against the edge of
the pages, but, say, the 10-inch division.
The steady and pitiless march of the hidden weaknesses in our
constitutions, through illness to death, is painfully revealed by
these histories of twins. We are too apt to look upon illness and
death as capricious events, and there are some who ascribe them to
the direct effect of supernatural interference, whereas the fact of
the maladies of two twins being continually alike shows that illness
and death are necessary incidents in a regular sequence of
constitutional changes beginning at birth, and upon which external
circumstances have, on the whole, very small effect. In cases where
the maladies of the twins are continually alike, the clocks of their
two lives move regularly on at the same rate, governed by their
internal mechanism. When the hands approach the hour, there are
sudden clicks, followed by a whirring of wheels; the moment that
they touch it, the strokes fall. Necessitarians may derive new
arguments from the life-histories of twins.
We will now consider the converse side of our subject, which appears
to me even the more important of the two. Hitherto we have
investigated cases where the similarity at first was close, but
afterwards became less; now we will examine those in which there was
great dissimilarity at first, and will see how far an identity of
nurture in childhood and youth tended to assimilate them. As has
been already mentioned, there is a large proportion of cases of
sharply-contrasted characteristics, both of body and mind, among
twins. I have twenty such cases, given with much detail. It is a
fact that extreme dissimilarity, such as existed between Esau and
Jacob, is a no less marked peculiarity in twins of the same sex than
extreme similarity. On this curious point, and on much else in the
history of twins, I have many remarks to make, but this is not the
place to make them.
The evidence given by the twenty cases above mentioned is absolutely
accordant, so that the character of the whole may be exactly
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 till the
age of fifteen."
(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 had 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 body and mind: 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 body or mind, and their
dissimilarity increases daily. The external influences have been
identical; they have never been separated."
(6.) "The two sisters are very different in ability and disposition.
The one is retiring, but firm and determined; she has no taste for
music or drawing. The other is of an active, excitable temperament:
she displays an unusual amount of quickness and talent, and is
passionately fond of music and drawing. From infancy, they have been
rarely separated even at school, and as children visiting their
friends, they always went together."
(7.) "They have been treated exactly alike both were brought up by
hand; they have been under the same nurse and governess from their
birth, and they are very fond of each other. Their increasing
dissimilarity must be ascribed to a natural difference of mind and
character, as there has been nothing in their treatment to account
for it."
(8.) "They are as different as possible. [A minute and unsparing
analysis of the characters of the two twins is given by their father,
most instructive to read, but impossible to publish without the
certainty of wounding the feelings of one of the twins, if these
pages should chance to fall under his eyes.] They were brought up
entirely by hand, that is, on cow's milk, and treated by one nurse
in precisely the same manner."
(9.) "The home-training and influence were precisely the same, and
therefore I consider the dissimilarity to be accounted for almost
entirely by innate disposition and by causes over which we have no
control."
(10.) "This case is, I should think, somewhat remarkable for
dissimilarity in physique as well as for strong contrast in character.
They have been unlike in body and mind throughout their lives. Both
were reared in a country house, and both were at the same schools
till _aet._ 16."
(11.) "Singularly unlike in body and mind from babyhood; in looks,
dispositions, and tastes they are quite different. I think I may
say the dissimilarity was innate, and developed more by time than
circumstance."
(12.) "We were never in the least degree alike. I should say my
sister's and my own character are diametrically opposed, and have
been utterly different from our birth, though a very strong
affection subsists between us."
(13.) The father remarks:--"They were curiously different in body
and mind from their birth."
The surviving twin (a senior wrangler of Cambridge) adds:--"A fact
struck all our school contemporaries, that my brother and I were
complementary, so to speak, in point of ability and disposition. He
was contemplative, poetical, and literary to a remarkable degree,
showing great power in that line. I was practical, mathematical, and
linguistic. Between us we should have made a very decent sort of a
man."
I could quote others just as strong as these, in some of which the
above phrase "complementary" also appears, while I have not a single
case in which my correspondents speak of originally dissimilar
characters having become assimilated through identity of nurture.
However, a somewhat exaggerated estimate of dissimilarity may be due
to the tendency of relatives to dwell unconsciously on distinctive
peculiarities, and to disregard the far more numerous points of
likeness that would first attract the notice of a stranger. Thus in
case 11 I find the remark, "Strangers see a strong likeness between
them, but none who knows them well can perceive it." Instances are
common of slight acquaintances mistaking members, and especially
daughters of a family, for one another, between whom intimate
friends can barely discover a resemblance. Still, making reasonable
allowance for unintentional exaggeration, the impression that all
this evidence leaves on the mind is one of some wonder whether
nurture can do anything at all, beyond giving instruction and
professional training. It emphatically corroborates and goes far
beyond the conclusions to which we had already been driven by the
cases of similarity. In those, the causes of divergence began to act
about the period of adult life, when the characters had become
somewhat fixed; but here the causes conducive to assimilation began
to act from the earliest moment of the existence of the twins, when
the disposition was most pliant, and they were continuous until the
period of adult life. There is no escape from the conclusion that
nature prevails enormously over nurture when the differences of
nurture do not exceed what is commonly to be found among persons of
the same rank of society and in the same country. My fear is, that
my evidence may seem to prove too much, and be discredited on that
account, as it appears contrary to all experience that nurture
should go for so little. But experience is often fallacious in
ascribing great effects to trifling circumstances. Many a person has
amused himself with throwing bits of stick into a tiny brook and
watching their progress; how they are arrested, first by one chance
obstacle, then by another; and again, how their onward course is
facilitated by a combination of circumstances. He might ascribe much
importance to each of these events, and think how largely the
destiny of the stick had been governed by a series of trifling
accidents. Nevertheless all the sticks succeed in passing down the
current, and in the long-run, they travel at nearly the same rate. So
it is with life, in respect to the several accidents which seem to
have had a great effect upon our careers. The one element, that
varies in different individuals, but is constant in each of them, is
the natural tendency; it corresponds to the current in the stream,
and inevitably asserts itself.
Much stress is laid on the persistence of moral impressions made in
childhood, and the conclusion is drawn, that the effects of early
teaching must be important in a corresponding degree. I acknowledge
the fact, so far as has been explained in the chapter on Early
Sentiments, but there is a considerable set-off on the other side.
Those teachings that conform to the natural aptitudes of the child
leave much more enduring marks than others. Now both the teachings
and the natural aptitudes of the child are usually derived from its
parents. They are able to understand the ways of one another more
intimately than is possible to persons not of the same blood, and
the child instinctively assimilates the habits and ways of thought
of its parents. Its disposition is "educated" by them, in the true
sense of the word; that is to say, it is evoked, not formed by them.
On these grounds I ascribe the persistence of many habits that date
from early home education, to the peculiarities of the instructors
rather than to the period when the instruction was given. The marks
left on the memory by the instructions of a foster-mother are soon
sponged clean away. Consider the history of the cuckoo, which is
reared exclusively by foster-mothers. It is probable that nearly
every young cuckoo, during a series of many hundred generations, has
been brought up in a family whose language is a chirp and a twitter.
But the cuckoo cannot or will not adopt that language, or any other
of the habits of its foster-parents. It leaves its birthplace as
soon as it is able, and finds out its own kith and kin, and
identifies itself henceforth with them. So utterly are its earliest
instructions in an alien bird-language neglected, and so completely
is its new education successful, that the note of the cuckoo tribe
is singularly correct.
DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS.[14]
[Footnote 14: This memoir is reprinted from the _Transactions of
the Ethnological Society_]
Before leaving the subject of Nature and Nurture, I would direct
attention to evidence bearing on the conditions under which animals
appear first to have been domesticated. It clearly shows the small
power of nurture against adverse natural tendencies.
The few animals that we now possess in a state of domestication were
first reclaimed from wildness in prehistoric times. Our remote
barbarian ancestors must be credited with having accomplished a very
remarkable feat, which no subsequent generation has rivalled. The
utmost that we of modern times have succeeded in doing, is to
improve the races of those animals that we received from our
forefathers in an already domesticated condition.
There are only two reasonable solutions of this exceedingly curious
fact. The one is, that men of highly original ideas, like the
mythical Prometheus, arose from time to time in the dawn of human
progress, and left their respective marks on the world by being the
first to subjugate the camel, the llama, the reindeer, the horse,
the ox, the sheep, the hog, the dog, or some other animal to the
service of man. The other hypothesis is that only a few species of
animals are fitted by their nature to become domestic, and that
these were discovered long ago through the exercise of no higher
intelligence than is to be found among barbarous tribes of the
present day. The failure of civilised man to add to the number of
domesticated species would on this supposition be due to the fact
that all the suitable material whence domestic animals could be
derived has been long since worked out.
I submit that the latter hypothesis is the true one for the reasons
about to be given; and if so, the finality of the process of
domestication must be accepted as one of the most striking instances
of the inflexibility of natural disposition, and of the limitations
thereby imposed upon the [15] choice of careers for animals, and by
analogy for those of men.
[Footnote 15: _Transactionsof the Ethnological Society_, 1865,
with an alteration in the opening and concluding paragraphs, and
with a few verbal emendations. If I had discussed the subject now
for the first time I should have given extracts from the and with a
few verbal emendations. If I had discussed the subject now for the
first time I should have given extracts from the works of the
travellers of the day, but it seemed needless to reopen the inquiry
merely to give it a more modern air. I have also preferred to let
the chapter stand as it was written, because considerable portions of
it have been quoted by various authors (_e.g._ Bagehot, _Economic
Studies_, pp. 161 to 166: Longman, 1880), and the original memoir is
not easily accessible.]
My argument will be this:--All savages maintain pet animals, many
tribes have sacred ones, and kings of ancient states have imported
captive animals on a vast scale, for purposes of show, from
neighbouring countries. I infer that every animal, of any pretensions,
has been tamed over and over again, and has had numerous
opportunities of becoming domesticated. But the cases are rare in
which these opportunities have led to any result. No animal is
fitted for domestication unless it fulfils certain stringent
conditions, which I will endeavour to state and to discuss. My
conclusion is, that all domesticable animals of any note have long
ago fallen under the yoke of man. In short, that the animal creation
has been pretty thoroughly, though half unconsciously, explored, by
the every-day habits of rude races and simple civilisations.
It is a fact familiar to all travellers, that savages frequently
capture young animals of various kinds, and rear them as favourites,
and sell or present them as curiosities. Human nature is generally
akin: savages may be brutal, but they are not on that account devoid
of our taste for taming and caressing young animals; nay, it is not
improbable that some races may possess it in a more marked degree
than ourselves, because it is a childish taste with us; and the
motives of an adult barbarian are very similar to those of a
civilised child.
In proving this assertion, I feel embarrassed with the multiplicity
of my facts. I have only space to submit a few typical instances,
and must, therefore, beg it will be borne in mind that the following
list could be largely reinforced. Yet even if I inserted all I have
thus far been able to collect, I believe insufficient justice would
be done to the real truth of the case. Captive animals do not
commonly fall within the observation of travellers, who mostly
confine themselves to their own encampments, and abstain from
entering the dirty dwellings of the natives; neither do the majority
of travellers think tamed animals worthy of detailed mention.
Consequently the anecdotes of their existence are scattered
sparingly among a large number of volumes. It is when those
travellers are questioned who have lived long and intimately with
savage tribes that the plenitude of available instances becomes most
apparent.
I proceed to give anecdotes of animals being tamed in various parts
of the world, at dates when they were severally beyond the reach of
civilised influences, and where, therefore, the pleasure taken by
the natives in taming them must be ascribed to their unassisted
mother-wit. It will be inferred that the same rude races who were
observed to be capable of great fondness towards animals in
particular instances, would not unfrequently show it in others.
[North America.]--The traveller Hearne, who wrote towards the end of
the last century, relates the following story of moose or elks in
the more northern parts of North America. He says:--
"I have repeatedly seen moose at Churchill as tame as sheep and even
more so.... The same Indian that brought them to the Factory had, in
the year 1770, two others so tame that when on his passage to Prince
of Wales's Fort in a canoe, the moose always followed him along the
bank of the river; and at night, or on any other occasion when the
Indians landed, the young moose generally came and fondled on them,
as the most domestic animal would have done, and never offered to
stray from the tents."
Sir John Richardson, in an obliging answer to my inquiries about the
Indians of North America, after mentioning the bison calves, wolves,
and other animals that they frequently capture and keep, said:--
"It is not unusual, I have heard, for the Indians to bring up young
bears, the women giving them milk from their own breasts."
He mentions that he himself purchased a young bear, and adds:--
"The red races are fond of pets and treat them kindly; and in
purchasing them there is always the unwillingness of the women and
children to overcome, rather than any dispute about price. My young
bear used to rob the women of the berries, they had gathered, but
the loss was borne with good nature."
I will again quote Hearne, who is unsurpassed for his minute and
accurate narratives of social scenes among the Indians and Esquimaux.
In speaking of wolves he says:--
"They always burrow underground to bring forth their young, and
though it is natural to suppose them very fierce at those times, yet
I have frequently seen the Indians go to their dens and take out the
young ones and play with them. I never knew a Northern Indian hurt
one of them; on the contrary, they always put them carefully into
the den again; and I have sometimes seen them paint the faces of the
young wolves with vermilion or red ochre."
[South America.]--Ulloa, an ancient traveller, says:--
"Though the Indian women breed fowl and other domestic animals in
their cottages, they never eat them: and even conceive such a
fondness for them, that they will not sell them, much less kill them
with their own hands. So that if a stranger who is obliged to pass
the night in one of their cottages, offers ever so much money for a
fowl, they refuse to part with it, and he finds himself under the
necessity of killing the fowl himself. At this his landlady shrieks,
dissolves into tears, and wrings her hands, as if it had been an
only son, till seeing the mischief past mending, she wipes her eyes
and quietly takes what the traveller offers her."
The care of the South American Indians, as Quiloa truly states, is
by no means confined to fowls. Mr. Bates, the distinguished
traveller and naturalist of the Amazons, has favoured me with a list
of twenty-two species of quadrupeds that he has found tame in the
encampments of the tribes of that valley. It includes the tapir, the
agouti, the guinea-pig, and the peccari. He has also noted five
species of quadrupeds that were in captivity, but not tamed. These
include the jaguar, the great ant-eater, and the armadillo. His list
of tamed birds is still more extensive.
[North Africa.]--The ancient Egyptians had a positive passion for
tamed animals, such as antelopes, monkeys, crocodiles, panthers, and
hyenas. Mr. Goodwin, the eminent Egyptologist, informed me that
"they anticipated our zoological tastes completely," and that some
of the pictures referring to tamed animals are among their very
earliest monuments, viz. 2000 or 3000 years B.C. Mr. Mansfield
Parkyns, who passed many years in Abyssinia and the countries of the
Upper Nile, writes me word in answer to my inquiries;--
"I am sure that negroes often capture and keep alive wild animals. I
have bought them and received them as presents--wild cats, jackals,
panthers, the wild dog, the two best lions now in the Zoological
Gardens, monkeys innumerable and of all sorts, and mongoose. I cannot
say that I distinctly recollect any pets among the _lowest_ orders
of men that I met with, such as the Denkas, but I am sure they exist,
and in this way. When I was on the White Nile and at Khartoum, very
few merchants went up the White Nile; none had stations. They were
little known to the natives; but none returned without some live
animal or bird which they had procured from them. While I was at
Khartoum, there came an Italian wild beast showman, after the
Wombwell style. He made a tour of the towns up to Doul and Fazogly,
Kordofan and the peninsula, and collected a large number of animals.
Thus my opinion distinctly is, that negroes do keep wild animals
alive. _I am sure of it_; though I can only vaguely recollect them
in one or two cases. I remember some chief in Abyssinia who had a
pet lion which he used to tease, and I have often seen monkeys about
huts."
[Equatorial Africa.]--The most remarkable instance I have met with
in modern Africa is the account of a menagerie that existed up to
the beginning of the reign of the present king of the Wahumas, on
the shores of Lake Nyanza. Suna, the great despot of that country,
reigned till 1857. Captains Burton and Speke were in the
neighbourhood in the following year, and Captain Burton thus
describes (_Journal R. G. Soc._, xxix. 282) the report he received
of Suna's collection:--
"He had a large menagerie of lions, elephants, leopards, and similar
beasts of disport; he also kept for amusement fifteen or sixteen
albinos; and so greedy was he of novelty, that even a cock of
peculiar form or colour would have been forwarded by its owner to
feed his eyes."
Captain Speke, in his subsequent journey to the Nile, passed many
months at Uganda, as the guest of Suna's youthful successor, M'tese.
The fame of the old menagerie was fresh when Captain Speke was there.
He wrote to me as follows concerning it:--
"I was told Suna kept buffaloes, antelopes, and animals of all
colours' (meaning 'sorts'), and in equal quantities. M'tese, his son,
no sooner came to the throne, than he indulged in shooting them down
before his admiring wives, and now he has only one buffalo and a few
parrots left."
In Kouka, near Lake Tchad, antelopes and ostriches are both kept tame,
as I was informed by Dr. Barth.
[South Africa.]--The instances are very numerous in South Africa
where the Boers and half-castes amuse themselves with rearing zebras,
antelopes, and the like; but I have not found many instances among
the native races. Those that are best known to us are mostly nomad
and in a chronic state of hunger, and therefore disinclined to
nurture captured animals as pets; nevertheless, some instances can
be adduced. Livingstone alludes to an extreme fondness for small
tame singing-birds (pp. 324 and 453). Dr. (now Sir John) Kirk, who
accompanied him in later years, mentions guinea-fowl--that do not
breed in confinement, and are merely kept as pets--in the Shire
valley, and Mr. Oswell has furnished me with one similar anecdote. I
feel, however, satisfied that abundant instances could be found if
properly sought for. It was the frequency with which I recollect to
have heard of tamed animals when I myself was in South Africa,
though I never witnessed any instance, that first suggested to me
the arguments of the present paper. Sir John Kirk informs me that:
"As you approach the coast or Portuguese settlements, pets of all
kinds become very common; but then the opportunity of occasionally
selling them to advantage may help to increase the number; still,
the more settled life has much to do with it."
In confirmation of this view, I will quote an early writer,
Pigafetta (_Hakluyt Coll._, ii. 562), on the South African kingdom
of Congo, who found a strange medley of animals in captivity, long
before the demands of semi-civilisation had begun to prompt their
collection:--
The King of Congo, on being Christianised by the Jesuit missionaries
in the sixteenth century, "signified that whoever had any idols
should deliver them to the lieutenants of the country. And within
less than a month all the idols which they worshipped were brought
into court, and certainly the number of these toys was infinite, for
every man adored what he liked without any measure or reason at all.
Some kept serpents of horrible figures, some worshipped the greatest
goats they could get, some leopards, and others monstrous creatures.
Some held in veneration certain unclean fowls, etc. Neither did they
content themselves with worshipping the said creatures when alive,
but also adored the very skins of them when they were dead and
stuffed with straw."
[Australia.]--Mr. Woodfield records the following touching anecdote
in a paper communicated to the Ethnological Society, as occurring in
an unsettled part of West Australia, where the natives rank as the
lowest race upon the earth:--
"During the summer of 1858-9 the Murchison river was visited by
great numbers of kites, the native country of these birds being
Shark's Bay. As other birds were scarce, we shot many of these kites,
merely for the sake of practice, the natives eagerly devouring them
as fast as they were killed. One day a man and woman, natives of
Shark's Bay, came to the Murchison, and the woman immediately
recognising the birds as coming from her country, assured us that
the natives there never kill them, and that they are so tame that
they will perch on the shoulders of the women and eat from their
hands. On seeing one shot she wept bitterly, and not even the offer
of the bird could assuage her grief, for she absolutely refused to
eat it. No more kites were shot while she remained among us."
The Australian women habitually feed the puppies they intend to rear
from their own breasts, and show an affection to them equal, if not
exceeding, that to their own infants. Sir Charles Nicholson informs
me that he has known an extraordinary passion for cats to be
demonstrated by Australian women at Fort Phillip.
[New Guinea Group.]--Captain Develyn is reported (Bennett,
_Naturalist in Australia_, p. 244) to say of the island of New
Britain, near Australia, that the natives consider cassowaries "to a
certain degree sacred, and rear them as pets. They carry them in their
arms, and entertain a great affection for them."
Professor Huxley informs me that he has seen sucking-pigs nursed at
the breasts of women, apparently as pets, in islands of the New
Guinea Group.
[Polynesia.]--The savage and cannibal Fijians were no exceptions to
the general rule, for Dr. Seemann wrote me word that they make pets
of the flying fox (bat), the lizard, and parroquet. Captain Wilkes,
in his exploring expedition (ii. 122), says the pigeon in the Samoon
islands "is commonly kept as a plaything, and particularly by the
chiefs. One of our officers unfortunately on one occasion shot a
pigeon, which caused great commotion, for the bird was a king pigeon,
and to kill it was thought as great a crime as to take the life of a
man."
Mr. Ellis, writing of these islands (_Polynesian Researches_, ii. 285),
says:--
"Eels are great favourites, and are tamed and fed till they attain
an enormous size. Taoarii had several in different parts of the
island. These pets were kept in large holes, two or three feet deep,
partially filled with water. I have been several times with the
young chief, when he has sat down by the side of the hole, and by
giving a shrill sort of whistle, has brought out an enormous eel,
which has moved about the surface of the water and eaten with
confidence out of his master's hand."
[Syria.]--I will conclude this branch of my argument by quoting the
most ancient allusion to a pet that I can discover in writing,
though some of the Egyptian pictured representations are
considerably older. It is the parable spoken by the Prophet Samuel
to King David, that is expressed in the following words:--
"The poor man had nothing save one little ewe lamb, which he had
bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him and with
his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup,
and lay in his bosom, and was to him as a daughter."
We will now turn to the next stage of our argument. Not only do
savages rear animals as pets, but communities maintain them as sacred.
The ox of India and the brute gods of Egypt occur to us at once; the
same superstition prevails widely. The quotation already given from
Pigafetta is in point; the fact is too well known to readers of
travel to make it necessary to devote space to its proof. I will
therefore simply give a graphic account, written by M. Jules Gerard,
of Whydah in West Africa:--
"I visited the Temple of Serpents in this town, where thirty of
these monstrous deities were asleep in various attitudes. Each day
at sunset, a priest brings them a certain number of sheep, goats,
fowls, etc., which are slaughtered in the temple and then divided
among the 'gods.' Subsequently during the night they (? the priests)
spread themselves about the town, entering the houses in various
quarters in search of further offerings. It is forbidden under
penalty of death to kill, wound, or even strike one of these sacred
serpents, or any other of the same species, and only the priests
possess the privilege of taking hold of them, for the purpose of
reinstating them in the temple should they be found elsewhere."
It would be tedious and unnecessary to adduce more instances of wild
animals being nurtured in the encampments of savages, either as pets
or as sacred animals. It will be found on inquiry that few travellers
have failed altogether to observe them. If we consider the small number
of encampments they severally visited in their line of march, compared
with the vast number that are spread over the whole area, which is or
has been inhabited by rude races, we may obtain some idea of the
thousands of places at which half-unconscious attempts at domestication
are being made in each year. These thousands must themselves be multiplied
many thousandfold, if we endeavour to calculate the number of similar
attempts that have been made since men like ourselves began to inhabit
the world.
My argument, strong as it is, admits of being considerably
strengthened by the following consideration:--
The natural inclination of barbarians is often powerfully reinforced
by an enormous demand for captured live animals on the part of their
more civilised neighbours. A desire to create vast hunting-grounds
and menageries and amphitheatrical shows, seems naturally to occur
to the monarchs who preside over early civilisations, and travellers
continually remark that, whenever there is a market for live animals,
savages will supply them in any quantities. The means they employ to
catch game for their daily food readily admits of their taking them
alive. Pit-falls, stake-nets, and springes do not kill. If the
savage captures an animal unhurt, and can make more by selling it
alive than dead, he will doubtless do so. He is well fitted by
education to keep a wild animal in captivity. His mode of pursuing
game requires a more intimate knowledge of the habits of beasts than
is ever acquired by sportsmen who use more perfect weapons. A savage
is obliged to steal upon his game, and to watch like a jackal for
the leavings of large beasts of prey. His own mode of life is akin
to that of the creatures he hunts. Consequently, the savage is a
good gamekeeper; captured animals thrive in his charge, and he finds
it remunerative to take them a long way to market. The demands of
ancient Rome appear to have penetrated Northern Africa as far or
farther than the steps of our modern explorers. The chief centres of
import of wild animals were Egypt, Assyria (and other Eastern
monarchies), Rome, Mexico, and Peru. I have not yet been able to
learn what were the habits of Hindostan or China. The modern
menagerie of Lucknow is the only considerable native effort in those
parts with which I am acquainted.
[Egypt.]--The mutilated statistical tablet of Karnak (_Trans. R. Soc.
Lit._, 1847, p. 369, and 1863, p. 65) refers to an armed invasion of
Armenia by Thothmes III., and the payment of a large tribute of
antelopes and birds. When Ptolemy Philadelphus feted the
Alexandrians (_Athenoeus_, v.), the Ethiopians brought dogs,
buffaloes, bears, leopards, lynxes, a giraffe, and a rhinoceros.
Doubtless this description of gifts was common. Live beasts are the
one article of curiosity and amusement that barbarians can offer to
civilised nations.
[Assyria.]--Mr. Fox Talbot thus translates (_Journal Asiatic Soc._,
xix. 124) part of the inscription on the black obelisk of Ashurakbal
found in Nineveh and now in the British Museum:--
"He caught in hunter's toils (a blank number) of armi, turakhi, nali,
and yadi. Every one of these animals he placed in separate enclosures.
He brought up their young ones and counted them as carefully as
young lambs. As to the creatures called burkish, utrati (dromedaries?),
tishani, and dagari, he wrote for them and they came. The
dromedaries he kept in enclosures, where he brought up their young
ones. He entrusted each kind of animal to men of their own country to
tend them. There were also curious animals of the Mediterranean Sea,
which the King of Egypt sent as a gift and entrusted to the care of
men of their own land. The very choicest animals were there in
abundance, and birds of heaven with beautiful wings. It was a
splendid menagerie, and all the work of his own hands. The names of
the animals were placed beside them."
[Rome.]--The extravagant demands for the amphitheatre of ancient
Rome must have stimulated the capture of wild animals in Asia, Africa,
and the then wild parts of Europe, to an extraordinary extent. I
will quote one instance from Gibbon:--
"By the order of Probus, a vast quantity of large trees torn up by
the roots were transplanted into the midst of the circus. The
spacious and shady forest was immediately filled with a thousand
ostriches, a thousand stags, a thousand fallow-deer, and a thousand
wild boars, and all this variety of game was abandoned to the
riotous impetuosity of the multitude. The tragedy of the succeeding
day consisted in the massacre of a hundred lions, an equal number of
lionesses, two hundred leopards, and three hundred bears."
Farther on we read of a spectacle by the younger Gordian of
"twenty zebras, ten elks, ten giraffes, thirty African hyenas, ten
Indian tigers, a rhinoceros, an hippopotamus, and thirty-two
elephants."
[Mexico.]--Gomara, the friend and executor of Herman Cortes, states:
--
"There were here also many cages made of stout beams, in some of
which there were lions (pumas); in others, tigers (jaguars); in
others, ounces; in others, wolves; nor was there any animal on four
legs that was not there. They had for their rations deer and other
animals of the chase. There were also kept in large jars or tanks,
snakes, alligators, and lizards. In another court there were cages
containing every kind of birds of prey, such as vultures, a dozen
sorts of falcons and hawks, eagles, and owls. The large eagles
received turkeys for their food. Our Spaniards were astonished at
seeing such a diversity of birds and beasts; nor did they find it
pleasant to hear the hissing of the poisonous snakes, the roaring of
the lions, the shrill cries of the wolves, nor the groans of the
other animals given to them for food."
[Peru.]--Garcilasso de la Vega (_Commentaries Reales_, v. 10), the
son of a Spanish conqueror by an Indian princess, born and bred in
Peru, writes:--
"All the strange birds and beasts which the chiefs presented to the
Inca were kept at court, both for grandeur and also to please the
Indians who presented them. When I came to Cuzco, I remember there
were some remains of places where they kept these creatures. One was
the serpent conservatory, and another where they kept the pumas,
jaguars, and bears."
[Syria and Greece.]--I could have said something on Solomon's apes
and peacocks, and could have quoted at length the magnificent order
given by Alexander the Great (Pliny, _Nat. Hist._, viii. 16) towards
supplying material for Aristotle's studies in natural history; but
enough has been said to prove what I maintained, namely, that
numerous cases occur, year after year, and age after age, in which
every animal of note is captured and its capabilities of
domestication unconsciously tested.
I would accept in a more stringent sense than it was probably
intended to bear, the text of St. James, who wrote at a time when a
vast variety and multitude of animals were constantly being
forwarded to Rome and to Antioch for amphitheatrical shows. He says
(James iii. 7), "Every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents,
and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind."
I conclude from what I have stated that there is no animal worthy of
domestication that has not frequently been captured, and might ages
ago have established itself as a domestic breed, had it not been
deficient in certain necessary particulars which I shall proceed to
discuss. These are numerous and so stringent as to leave no ground
for wonder that out of the vast abundance of the animal creation,
only a few varieties of a few species should have become the
companions of man.
It by no means follows that because a savage cares to take home a
young fawn to amuse himself, his family, and his friends, that he
will always continue to feed or to look after it. Such attention
would require a steadiness of purpose foreign to the ordinary
character of a savage. But herein lie two shrewd tests of the
eventual destiny of the animal as a domestic species.
_Hardiness_.--It must be able to shift for itself and to thrive,
although it is neglected; since, if it wanted much care, it would
never be worth its keep.
The hardiness of our domestic animals is shown by the rapidity with
which they establish themselves in new lands. The goats and hogs
left on islands by the earlier navigators throve excellently on the
whole. The horse has taken possession of the Pampas, and the sheep
and ox of Australia. The dog is hardly repressible in the streets of
an Oriental town.
_Fondness of Man_.--Secondly, it must cling to man, notwithstanding
occasional hard usage and frequent neglect. If the animal had no
natural attachment to our species, it would fret itself to death, or
escape and revert to wildness. It is easy to find cases where the
partial or total non-fulfilment of this condition is a corresponding
obstacle to domestication. Some kinds of cattle are too precious to
be discarded, but very troublesome to look after. Such are the
reindeer to the Lapps. Mr. Campbell of Islay informed me that the
tamest of certain herds of them look as if they were wild; they have
to be caught with a lasso to be milked. If they take fright, they
are off to the hills; consequently the Lapps are forced to
accommodate themselves to the habits of their beasts, and to follow
them from snow to sea and from sea to snow at different seasons. The
North American reindeer has never been domesticated, owing, I presume,
to this cause. The Peruvian herdsmen would have had great trouble to
endure had the llama and alpaca not existed, for their cogeners, the
huanacu and the vicuna, are hardly to be domesticated.
Zebras, speaking broadly, are unmanageable. The Dutch Boers
constantly endeavour to break them to harness, and though they
occasionally succeed to a degree, the wild mulish nature of the
animal is always breaking out, and liable to balk them.
It is certain that some animals have naturally a greater fondness
for man than others; and as a proof of this, I will again quote
Hearne about the moose, who are considered by him to be the easiest
to tame and domesticate of any of the deer tribe. Formerly the
closely-allied European elks were domesticated in Sweden, and used
to draw sledges, as they are now occasionally in Canada; but they
have been obsolete for many years. Hearne says:--
"The young ones are so simple that I remember to have seen an Indian
paddle his canoe up to one of them, and take it by the poll, without
experiencing the least opposition, the poor harmless animal seeming
at the same time as contented alongside the canoe as if swimming by
the side of its dam, and looking up in our faces with the same
fearless innocence that a house lamb would."
On the other hand, a young bison will try to dash out its brains
against the tree to which it is tied, in terror and hatred of its
captors.
It is interesting to note the causes that conduce to a decided
attachment of certain animals to man, or between one kind of animal
and another. It is notorious that attachments and aversions exist in
nature. Swallows, rooks, and storks frequent dwelling houses;
ostriches and zebras herd together; so do bisons and elks. On the
other hand, deer and sheep, which are both gregarious, and both eat
the same food and graze within the same enclosure, avoid one another.
The spotted Danish dog, the Spitz dog, and the cat, have all a
strong attachment to horses, and horses seem pleased with their
company; but dogs and cats are proverbially discordant. I presume
that two species of animals do not consider one another companionable,
or clubable, unless their behaviour and their persons are
reciprocally agreeable. A phlegmatic animal would be exceedingly
disquieted by the close companionship of an excitable one. The
movements of one beast may have a character that is unpleasing to
the eyes of another; his cries may sound discordant; his smell may
be repulsive. Two herds of animals would hardly intermingle, unless
their respective languages of action and of voice were mutually
intelligible. The animal which above all others is a companion to
man is the dog, and we observe how readily their proceedings are
intelligible to each other. Every whine or bark of the dog, each of
his fawning, savage, or timorous movements is the exact counterpart
of what would have been the man's behaviour, had he felt similar
emotions. As the man understands the thoughts of the dog, so the dog
understands the thoughts of the man, by attending to his natural
voice, his countenance, and his actions. A man irritates a dog by an
ordinary laugh, he frightens him by an angry look, or he calms him
by a kindly bearing; but he has less spontaneous hold over an ox or a
sheep. He must study their ways and tutor his behaviour before he
can either understand the feelings of those animals or make his own
intelligible to them. He has no natural power at all over many other
creatures. Who, for instance, ever succeeded in frowning away a
mosquito, or in pacifying an angry wasp by a smile?
_Desire of Comfort_.--This is a motive which strongly attaches
certain animals to human habitations, even though they are unwelcome:
it is a motive which few persons who have not had an opportunity of
studying animals in savage lands are likely to estimate at its true
value. The life of all beasts in their wild state is an exceedingly
anxious one. From my own recollection, I believe that every antelope
in South Africa has to run for its life every one or two days upon
an average, and that he starts or gallops under the influence of a
false alarm many times in a day. Those who have crouched at night by
the side of pools in the desert, in order to have a shot at the
beasts that frequent them, see strange scenes of animal life; how
the creatures gambol at one moment and fight at another; how a herd
suddenly halts in strained attention, and then breaks into a
maddened rush, as one of them becomes conscious of the stealthy
movements or rank scent of a beast of prey. Now this hourly
life-and-death excitement is a keen delight to most wild creatures,
but must be peculiarly distracting to the comfort-loving temperament
of others. The latter are alone suited to endure the crass habits
and dull routine of domesticated life. Suppose that an animal which
has been captured and half-tamed, received ill-usage from his captors,
either as punishment or through mere brutality, and that he rushed
indignantly into the forest with his ribs aching from blows and
stones. If a comfort-loving animal, he will probably be no gainer by
the change, more serious alarms and no less ill-usage awaits him; he
hears the roar of the wild beasts and the headlong gallop of the
frightened herds, and he finds the buttings and the kicks of other
animals harder to endure than the blows from which he fled. He has
the disadvantage of being a stranger, for the herds of his own
species which he seeks for companionship constitute so many cliques,
into which he can only find admission by more fighting with their
strongest members than he has spirit to undergo. As a set-off
against these miseries, the freedom of savage life has no charms for
his temperament; so the end of it is, that with a heavy heart he
turns back to the habitation he had quitted. When animals thoroughly
enjoy the excitement of wild life, I presume they cannot be
domesticated, they could only be tamed, for they would never return
from the joys of the wilderness after they had once tasted them
through some accidental wandering.
Gallinas, or guinea-fowl, have so little care for comfort, or indeed
for man, that they fall but a short way within the frontier of
domestication. It is only in inclement seasons that they take
contentedly to the poultry-yards.
Elephants, from their size and power, are not dependent on man for
protection; hence, those that have been reared as pets from the time
they were calves, and have never learned to dread and obey the
orders of a driver, are peculiarly apt to revert to wildness if they
once are allowed to wander and escape to the woods. I believe this
tendency, together with the cost of maintenance and the comparative
uselessness of the beasts, are among the chief causes why Africans
never tame them now; though they have not wholly lost the practice
of capturing them when full-grown, and of keeping them imprisoned
for some days alive. Mr. Winwood Reade's account of captured
elephants, seen by himself near Glass Town in Equatorial Western
Africa, is very curious.
_Usefulness to Man_.--To proceed with the list of requirements
which a captured animal must satisfy before it is possible he could
be permanently domesticated: there is the very obvious condition
that he should be useful to man; otherwise, in growing to maturity,
and losing the pleasing youthful ways which had first attracted his
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