HEREDITY AND REPRODUCTION
=Life is real.=--What is life? Many theories have been offered by the
leading materialistic students of the past and present, but all have
signally failed to tell us what life is in its ultimate essence. All
attempts to discover life by aid of the scalpel, microscope and chemical
analysis have likewise failed. This class of scientists has made several
attempts to explain life as being the phenomena of matter undergoing
certain peculiar chemical changes, or due to molecular motion. They have
failed to recognize two great realms of existence, the material and the
immaterial, the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the
intangible. Life, physical, mental and spiritual, though invisible and
immaterial, is none the less real in its essence.
The materialists have tried hard to explain reproduction and heredity on
a physical basis. By this method they have failed to explain many of the
most common facts.
=The germ cell.=--The difference between the germ cells of the lower
animals and man is not in their structure, or their chemical elements,
but in their inherent life. Here are three germ cells. As fast as the
scientist is capable of analyzing them they may be absolutely identical
in their physical anatomy, yet one may contain the life of a rabbit,
another the life of a dog, and still another the soul of a man. The
physical anatomy does not determine whether the offspring is to be a
rabbit, a dog, or a human being. It is the resident life that determines
this. Physical organs are the mediums through which life reproduces
itself. The heredity of the offspring is determined by the many
influences brought to bear upon it before birth and upon the lives of
the ancestors.
=Masculine and feminine principal.=--The organic world is pregnant with
two primary and vital principles, the masculine and the feminine. Every
plant, lower animal, and man is reproduced by the union of these
principles. In the lower forms of plant and animal life these two
principles reside in the same organism. Reproduction takes place within
the parent organism by the union of these two natures. The parent
organism divides and becomes two distinct organisms. This is
reproduction by division.
=Reproduction in the lower forms of life.=--In the next higher forms of
plant and animal life these two principles reside in the same
individuals, but in separate organs. These organs possessing the female
nature produce seeds or eggs. The organs possessing the male nature
produce a fertilizing substance called pollen or semen. Reproduction
takes place by the fusion of the male and female cells.
In the higher animals and man these principles reside in separate
individuals. In some mysterious way the procreative cells have residing
within themselves, in rudimentary form, all the attributes of the
parents.
=Sex is in the life principle.=--Once sex was considered a part of the
physical organism. Now we are beginning to see that sex is vitally and
substantially related to life. When a little plant comes into the world
it is because the masculine and feminine sex principles have united on
the plane of physical life. Like begets like. The baby plant did not
possess animal life, intellectual life, or moral life for the reason
that the parent plant could not transmit a form of life it did not
possess in its masculine and feminine nature.
When the little animal comes into this world it is because the masculine
and feminine principles have united on the plane of instinctive animal
life and, among the higher classes of animals, rudimentary mental life.
=Reproduction man.=--Man is organized on higher planes than the rest of
the organic world. Man possesses not only the highest form of physical
life, but also mental and spiritual life. Sex in man is primarily and
substantially related to his physical, mental and spiritual life. The
sperm cell of the father is formed from his blood and possesses the
essence of his three-fold nature. The germ cell of the mother is formed
from her blood and possesses the essence of her three-fold nature. When
these two cells, masculine and feminine, unite under proper conditions,
a human being having a physical, mental and moral nature, is started
upon its endless voyage, nine months before it makes its visible
appearance in the world. When God made the body of primitive man He
“breathed into him the breath of life (Hebrew lives) and man became a
living soul,” having power of self-propagation and the power to transmit
potential procreative power from one generation to another.
=Man’s relation to the past.=--Each new being at the initial of life is
the sum total of all the influences, good and bad, of his ancestry back
to Adam. The child is largely the product of his parents. He is not a
duplicate of either, but the product of their blended personalities,
being influenced much by his grand-parents, less and less as his
ancestry becomes more and more remote. During embryonic and fetal
development the child will tend to unfold in all departments of its
nature according to the pattern received from its ancestors, but this
may be more or less influenced by maternal impressions. After birth the
child has two agents that will ever be active, heredity and
environment. These two agents at their best are never perfect. Hence
the child will ever need a third agent, the grace of God.
=Why children in the same home differ.=--Here is a family of five
children. They differ from each other quite as much as if they
represented five families. Now, if heredity does not explain this
difference, then the children, having the same environment, would be
alike. The children in the same home differ from each other for the
reason that the parents, at the creative moment, did not sustain to each
child the same combination of physical, mental and moral relations. At
the creative moment of the second child the parents were not in the same
physical, mental and moral states they were at the creative moment of
the first. They had each changed in their physical states of health,
their mental interests and in their moral and religious convictions and
experiences. For the same reason each child differs from all the others
in the family. Though they had the same environments, no two were alike.
So great is the influence of heredity that no two people can be made
alike by giving to them the same environment.
=Twins.=--If two persons could receive the same heredity and environment,
they would be exactly alike. The nearest approach we have to this is in
the case of twins. Nearly one-half of twins are so much alike
[Illustration: LOUISE AND MAY CARTER, TWINS.]
that it is difficult to tell them apart. Other twins resemble each other
more than children in the same home born months apart.
=Why some are alike and others are not.=--If the creative moment of twins
were the same, or nearly the same, the parents sustained to each the
same combination of influences. If their creative moments occurred hours
or even days apart, then there was time for one or both parents to
sustain a different relation to one, from that they sustained to the
other. This accounts for the difference between some twins. Not only do
twins resemble each other physically, but often their mental and moral
tastes and tendencies are very much alike.
=Twin brothers.=--I once met twin brothers sixty-seven years old. They had
been lost to each other for fourteen years. They still resembled each
other, dressed alike, wore their beards and hair alike, talked and
laughed alike. Sixty-seven years had not greatly modified their physical
and mental resemblance. Twin children usually inherit similar
perfections or imperfections. This I have noticed for a number of years.
Where I am now writing is a club-footed, rheumatic boy. His twin brother
is feeble-minded. In an adjoining state a few days ago I studied a young
man who was helpless from his arms down. His twin sister was helpless at
birth and died in childhood. These examples indicate that the
before-birth influences being the same, were the causes of these defects
in the offspring.
=An objection answered.=--A man said to me, “I don’t believe in heredity.”
I asked him why he did not. He replied, “I know of a drunken father who
had four sons; two were dissipated from their youth and two were
‘teetotalers.’ If the father had had anything to do with this, all would
have been drunkards.”
My reply was, “The father through the laws of heredity may have
transmitted to two of his boys tendencies toward drunkenness and to the
other two, tendencies toward sobriety. In the case of the first two, the
father might have, in his mental and moral natures, favored
intemperance, longed for alcohol, or been on a drunken debauch at the
initial of their lives. With reference to the last two, the father might
have temporarily reformed, mentally and morally, he might have been
strongly opposed to the use of strong drink at the initial of their
lives.
“Again the mother might have had very light convictions on temperance
prior to the birth of the first two and very strong mental and moral
opposition prior to the birth of the last two. Again something in the
form of environment may have led the last two to overcome their
inherited tendencies toward drink.”
=Materialistic theory fails.=--Materialistic philosophers admit that
heredity tends to reproduce the likeness of the parents in the child.
They try to explain this on a purely physical basis. Prof. Huxley, Mr.
Spencer and the more modern Weismann, while they have each coined some
new technical terms with which to convey their materialistic ideas,
suppose that each procreative cell, masculine and feminine, contains a
representative material something from every atom of the respective body
from which it was formed. In this way the child has a body with marked
resemblance to its parents. Since, according to their theory, all mental
and moral phenomena are due to chemical changes and molecular
disturbances in the brain, and since the child inherited a brain like
its parents, the molecular movements of the child’s brain will be like
the molecular movements in the brains of its parents; hence it will have
inherited the mental and moral characteristics of the father and mother.
=Life is a unit.=--It takes only a few days for the procreative cells to
be elaborated and matured. Here is a child. The initial of its life
occurred twenty years after its parents had their right arms amputated.
How could the procreative cells that formed the initial of that child’s
life have in them a material representation from the right arms of those
parents that had been amputated twenty years before the birth of the
child? Suppose that the parents had undergone a much larger mutilation
of the body, leaving them only the organs necessary to continued life
and propagation, would the child have inherited the absent parts? Yes.
Why? For the reason that sex is in the life of the individual, and not
simply in the material substance of the body. A human body may have had
some of the members removed but the physical life remains a unit. The
embryo formed by the union of a masculine and a feminine cell will have
a unit of physical life. During the nine months of gestation this unit
of embryonic physical life will be incarnated in a unit of physical
organism. Should a lobe of the brain of each parent, through which some
mental or moral attribute functions, be removed, the child would inherit
a unit of brain organism, for the reason that it inherited from the
parents a unit of mental and moral life.
=Sex a resident part of life.=--These illustrations show that sex is
vitally related to the physical, mental and moral life; that the
physical nature of the child is the product of the union of the
masculine and feminine principles of the physical life of the parents
represented in the procreative cells; that the mental nature of the
child is the product of the union of the masculine and feminine
principles of the mental life of the parents represented in the
procreative cells; that the spiritual nature of the child is the product
of the union of the masculine and feminine principles of the spiritual
life of the parents represented in the procreative cells. The three-fold
life of a child is the product of the blending of the three-fold life of
its parents.
=Heredity explained.=--The Bible tells us that “the blood is the life.”
Science cannot express this truth better. The three-fold expressions of
life are not in the blood. The blood furnishes life for every cell.
Physical, mental and moral states are influenced by the conditions of
the blood. These three natures meet and influence each other in the
blood. Jesus appealed to the will of the patient. “Wilt thou be made
whole?” “Arise, take up thy bed and walk.” “Stretch forth thy hand.”
Jesus recognized the influence of the mind, expressed in will, as well
as the spiritual expressed in faith, as a means of physical restoration.
Every successful doctor, whatever may be his medical views, recognizes
the value of a strong purpose to recover.
=Effects of different mental states.=--Men and animals alike lick a fresh
wound. Nature teaches them that the saliva alleviates pain and heals the
wound. If an angry person bites you, or you lick a wound after an hour
of intense anger, you have a wound with all the symptoms of poison and
it will be difficult to cure. Hundreds of cases are on record where
angry mothers nursing their babies have thereby thrown them into
convulsions or spasms. Jealousy will result in digestive disturbances.
One can grieve so much over the loss of property or some member of the
home by death as to injure the health. It is claimed that a great
chemist took the various secretions from a subject that had been
intensely angry for hours and succeeded in removing from the various
secretions more than a score of poisons. In the case of another subject
swayed by holy impulses, the kindest of feelings, the purest of love, he
removed more than a score of wholesome, nutritious ingredients without a
single poison.
=Mental and moral states influence the offspring.=--If right mental and
moral states will give to the saliva, secreted from the blood, curative
properties; and wrong mental and moral states will give the saliva a
poisonous nature; if right mental and moral states influence the milk
secreted by the breasts of a mother in a normal way; and wrong mental
and moral states will so influence the mother’s blood as to throw her
four-months-old nursing babe into spasms, cannot the father’s mental and
moral states influence the creative secretions from his blood, and the
mother’s mental and moral states, at the creative moment and during the
nine months of embryonic and fetal development, influence the creative
and life sustaining and life-developing secretions from her blood?
=Who was to blame?=--I once met a family during one of my lecture courses
and was entertained in the home over night. Their children, five in
number, all during my lecture picked at each other, scratched each
other, fought each other, fussed, quarreled and cried. As we rode in the
carriage to their home and during our visit those youngsters kept up
this same line of entertainment. After I had retired the man stepped
into my room and whispered to me that he and his wife were in great
trouble, that they had been at the point of separation for ten years and
asked me to teach them how to live happily together, and to be less
miserable. I asked him to tell me the cause of their inharmony. “Oh,
there is but one trouble between wife and me!” He spoke as if that were
quite insignificant. Finally he told me that the trouble in the home
was, “neither of us can control our tempers.” As he left my room I
realized that for once in life I had a government contract on my hands.
Then I mused: “Ten years of quarreling, ten years of disagreement, ten
years of family feuds and family strife and these parents have
transmitted more of bad disposition to their children than the children
will be able to conquer in a lifetime, or these parents will be able to
whip out of them before they are of age, chasing them around over a
three-hundred-acre farm.” Continuing my meditation I thought: “If I had
the power to make laws, I would make a law of mercy for such
unfortunate children as these. That law would provide that where parents
transmit as much unnecessary devilment to their children as these
parents have to theirs, that the children should have the legal right to
whip their daddies and mammies.”
=The child not an exact duplicate of either parent.=--These parents had
produced their mental and moral states in their children.
These illustrations will help you to understand the philosophy of
heredity. The two cells that unite to form the initial of every new life
are elaborated from the blood of their respective parents and each cell
has the physical, mental and moral natures of its parents in potential
form. Were it possible for a child to inherit its size, form, features,
disposition, tendencies, etc., from only one of its parents, and to grow
to maturity uninfluenced by environment and education, it would
necessarily be an exact duplicate of that parent. Because of its dual
parentage, the maternal impressions received before birth, and the ever
varying influences of environment and education, the child will be
unlike any other person that ever lived.
=The child resembles both.=--These cells often remain in the bodies of the
respective parents for several days before the initial of a life takes
place. It follows that the mental and moral states, as well as the
physical condition of the parents, for many days before conception takes
place, will influence the child. There is no doubt but the remote
conditions of the parents are transmitted, but not so certainly and so
fully as the existing, or recently existing, states of the parents. At
the initial moment the three natures of each of the parents will be
greatly modified in the union of the cells. If the separate natures of
the parents did not blend in the child, the child would have two mental
natures, two moral natures and two physical natures. The modification of
the inherited tendencies from each parent will depend largely upon the
relative strength of these natures in the parents. Hence, where the same
characteristic exists in each parent it will appear in the child in a
reduced, duplicated or exaggerated form.
=Prenatal opportunities.=--During prenatal life, the forming child in the
mother’s body is supplied with its physical, mental and moral building
material from the mother’s blood. During the first twelve months of its
postnatal life, or the period of lactation, the mother’s blood,
environment and education are the child’s sources of physical
development. During these periods the child is almost wholly pliable in
the hands of its physical sculptors and mental and moral teachers. The
prenatal existence of a child affords the parents their greatest
opportunity to train the child, “in the way it should go.”
=Mother’s advantage.=--From these facts we see that the mother has the
advantage of the father in influencing the forming body, the plastic
brain and the sensitive soul of the child. Owing to the double standard
of morals it is certainly a blessing to the world that this is true.
Whatever is undesirable in the father, especially in his moral life, in
a measure may be overcome by the mother. The story of Abraham’s two
sons, Isaac, the true son, and Ishmael, the son of the bond woman, is a
familiar illustration of this truth. Isaac became a good man; Ishmael
became a bad man, the founder of the Ishmaelites, “whose hand was
against every man.” Do you recall to memory a mother fallen in
character? What has become of her children? Daughters fallen and sons
worthless, often without an exception.
Suppose women all lived as men do, what would be the effect on the
coming generation? Suppose men and women were alike temperate, honest,
truthful and pure, our civilization would be as much superior to the
present as the present civilization is superior to heathenism.
=The mother’s larger hereditary influence proven.=--Do you recall a
drunken mother? How about the children? Dissipated and delinquent. A
young lawyer, gifted, conceited, ambitious and eager for position and
power had, according to his views, but one thing in his way to the goal
of success--money. After thinking over the surest and best methods of
getting money he decided to marry it. His first opportunity was a
wealthy feeble-minded heiress. He married her. To their marriage five
children were born. Three were positively mentally weak. The other two
were noticeably so. Of these two, the first was a natural thief and the
other a natural liar. Only one child resembled the young lawyer, the
last one.
=When training should begin.=--It was a saying of a Yale president that “a
child’s training should begin with its grandparents.” Another has said,
“A child’s training should begin one hundred years before it is born.”
There is more truth in those quaint sayings than many are willing to
accept. Most parents give their children no premeditated and intelligent
prenatal training, and many think that when the child has become
accountable is soon enough for its training to begin.
=Children products of blind chance.=--There is an idea among many that
every child comes straight from God and made to His order, and that
parents are obediently to receive them when God sends them. Let the
child be beautiful or homely, blonde or brunette, girl or boy, strong or
feeble-minded, good or bad, no matter, God gave the child. Some think
these things are all accidents, fortunes or misfortunes, or they belong
to “the unknowable.” There are no accidents. Every effect has its cause.
Nothing comes by chance alone. Unalterable and invariable law governs
everything. The law of heredity is as unerring as the law of
gravitation. Our ignorance of the law does not prevent its operation.
=Robbed of their birthright.=--The great mass of people are not well-born.
Aside from the degenerate criminal and the feeble-minded, universally
recognized products of heredity, most people are below what nature would
teach us they should be. They were born with mediocre capacities for
business success and intellectual attainment. Give them the earliest and
best advantages and training that this country affords and marked
improvements will be made by them, but they will not make great men in
any line of life work, for the simple reason that they cannot. It takes
some natural capacity for the highest success.
Occasionally a child of unusual gifts is born of parents much below the
average. The parents and their friends are likely to believe the gift to
be a special divine bestowment. But, if the child’s prenatal history
could be fully known this would be accounted for on the basis of
hereditary law. The unscientific farmer may occasionally raise a fine
ear of corn or a very large crop of potatoes. But the intelligent,
scientific farmer raises only the best.
=Sowing wild oats.=--If girls were addicted to loafing on the streets,
swearing and telling vulgar stories, smoking and drinking, gambling and
going to questionable places, we should not consider this good training
for wifehood and motherhood. No intelligent man would choose such a girl
to be the wife of his bosom, the queen of his home, the mother of his
children. He is an ardent believer in the training of girls before
marriage for wifehood and motherhood. Boys who engage in any of these
sins are as much unfitting themselves for parentage as girls would be.
“Oh, but a reformed rake makes the best husband.” If he makes the shadow
of one, it will be a miracle of grace that he does it. No “rake” can in
his own strength make a good father. If by God’s help he makes a good
husband and father, this will be done in spite of his former life, and,
not because he had been a “rake.” Sowing wild oats in youth does not
make it easier to be good in after life, but more difficult. Boys and
young men should live with a view to husbandhood and fatherhood.
=Immature parents.=--Experienced stock raisers will not breed inferior or
immature stock. If one or both animals to be used for breeding purposes
be young, immature, the offspring will be inferior. All leading
physiologists place man’s maturity at about twenty-four and a woman’s at
about twenty. If continence in thought and life controlled our social
relations, it would be best for the human family if marriage did not
take place until maturity. Under existing social conditions, sexual
dissipation, and its dangers, it is perhaps best, in some cases, that
they marry a few years younger. But for fifteen-and sixteen-year-old
girls and nineteen-and twenty-year-old boys to marry is a decided
physiological and psychological mistake. Children can no more parent
normal children than can pigs, colts, and kids parent normal young. A
great sociologist says that four to six per cent. more children whose
mothers married at sixteen will die in their first year than among
children whose mothers married at twenty; and that six to ten per cent.
more children whose fathers married at twenty will die in their first
year than among children whose fathers married at twenty-four.
=An ideal family.=--At the close of a lecture on heredity in a college
town, a gentleman invited me to take dinner at his home the next day. I
accepted his invitation. From eleven o’clock to twelve he and I sat in
front of his little cottage home chatting pleasantly. When the college
bell announced the noon hour, he turned and said, “When my two boys and
my girl return home for dinner I want you to study them as examples of
intelligently applied laws of parental preparation, prenatal training,
good environment and the Grace of God.”
A few minutes later my attention was called to the rattling of the gate.
Turning, I beheld two fine specimens of physical manhood and an equally
fine specimen of physical womanhood. On closer acquaintance I found they
were leaders in all their classes, leaders in the best circles of
society and leaders in church work.
Dinner over, the young people returned to college; dishes were cleared
away, and father, mother and I sat in front of that same cottage home;
the conversation naturally drifted to heredity and to the young people.
The father humbly but proudly said, “Professor, if wife and I should
sell all we have, including our wardrobe, we could not raise $1,500. We
have never been ambitious for broad acres of land, a palatial home or
heavy deposits in the bank. We have had just one all-controlling purpose
in our married life, and that has been to give to the world a family of
children who will honor us after we are dead, be a blessing to the world
and glorify God.” My reply was, “You have certainly erected to your
memory three splendid monuments, monuments far grander than if you had
worn out your muscle and brains in the production of sordid silver and
gold and had left to your children a round million, and they, out of
their gratitude, had erected to your memory a marble shaft piercing the
very sky.”
I said it then, I have repeated it many times since, “I wish I had the
money to pay the transportation and hotel bills of this family on my
lecture trips and at the close of a lecture on heredity, could call this
family to the platform as a living example of intelligently applied
principles of eugenics.” If the initial moment of every child born into
this world were intelligently planned for, its prenatal rights
respected, its advent warmly welcomed, its environments wisely chosen
and it were early led to accept Christ, every family would be equal to
this family, and the next generation much superior to this. Will you,
gentle reader, model your ideals after this home, teach these truths to
others, and teach them to teach these truths to still others? If you
will, then you will have done your part towards the world’s redemption.