Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 32.djvu/849

Rh wealthy citizen, in spite of all my disadvantages, while he, poor idle dog, has never been able to secure as much as a brief, with all his learning! I'm fifty per cent a better man than he is!" Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity.

The fact is, if we want impartially to discuss this question of characters we must each leave our own supernaturally beautiful character out of the questonquestion [sic], and think only of the vastly inferior and ordinary characters of other people. We mustn't even allege striking instances from the history of our sisters, our cousins, and our aunts, because there, on the one hand, our calm sense of the excellence of the stock from which we ourselves are the final flower and topmost outcome is apt to prejudice our better judgment, while on the other hand our natural contempt for the gross shortcomings of our near relations under such closely similar circumstances, when compared with our own virtues and strong points, is liable to beget in us too lordly a superciliousness toward their obvious failings. It is best entirely to dismiss from consideration all the persons standing to ourselves within the list of prohibited degrees set forth in the Prayer Book, to abstain from too fond an affection for our grandmother, and to concentrate our attention wholly on the persons of that common vulgar herd of outsiders falling as aforesaid under the contemptible category of other people.

Examined from this impartial and objective point of view, then, other families beside our own show us at once how much light may be cast upon the origin of character by the study of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, first and second cousins, and so forth indefinitely. Mr. Galton's exhaustive paper upon the habits and manners of the common twin is an admirable example of the precise results that may be obtained by such minute and accurate objective study of hereditary peculiarities. For it must always be remembered that two brothers ought by nature to resemble one another far more closely than father and son. People often wonder why such-and-such a great man's son should not be a great man also; they ought, if logical, rather to ask why his brothers and sisters were not all of them equally great men and women. I will not insult the intelligence of the reader by pointing out to him why this should be—why the father's traits in such a case should be diluted just one half by the equal intermixture derived from the mother. For the same reason, of course, two sisters ought by nature to resemble one another far more closely than mother and daughter. Again, a son ought on the average to resemble his father in character somewhat more closely than he resembles his mother, because in the one case the identity of sex will cause certain necessary approximations, and in the other case the diversity of sex will cause certain necessary divergencies. The barber in Leech's picture explains his young customer's defective whiskers on the ground that he probably "took after his ma!" but experience shows that in such matters men usually "take after their pa" instead. Once more, for a similar reason two brothers will tend