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About The Sunday Oregonian. (Portland, Ore.) 1881-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 1, 1915)
TTTE SUNDAY OREGOXIAN, PORTLAND. AUGUST 1, 1915. 7 THERE ara ioim question Into the why and wherefore of some things that are "patent revers ible" they can Just i well ba asked from one end as the other. It la limply a matter of the point of view which experience or custom hi led us to take, or even of the anile from which, for Tarioua personal reasons, we would prefer to regard them. The fact of "family likeness" I.e.. the resemblance of children to their parents In a few more or less super, flclal respects Is so familiar and has so often been commented upon that we have accepted It as an axiom and pro ceeded to extend It to the whole make up of Uie offspring;, both mental and physical. We almost expect children of the same parents to be little casts out of the same mould, replicas of one another, differing- only In the date mark, and "as like as peas in a pod." This last expression happens to fur nish a striking and perfectly typical Il lustration of how superficial and wjole soroe our ldeaa of likeness really are. For. as a matter of fact no two peas In a pcd are ever alike, with the pos sible exception of one or two In the middle of very Ions; one. and even they can easily be distinguished from one another by a few minutes' or even seconds' careful Inspection. It seems right and proper and In accordance with the eternal fitness of thing's that our children should re semble us. that our boys should be chips of the old block and our girls rosebuls from the quven rose's stem I "more beautiful daughters of a most beautiful mother"). It is such a deli cate flattery to our rrlde to feel that nature thinks our particular type worth reproducing; and preserving;, for whenever we speak of the superman or the Ideal deslrabl human type, it Is the gentleman who walks about nnder our own hat that we really have In mind, though perhaps quite uncon sciously, or at least someone wio has a strong; family likeness to him. Besides. It simplifies practical prob lems, for then the boy can become ap prentice and assistant In his father's trade, or can keep up the traditions of the firm, or take over the shop, or Inherit the practice. In spite of our love of change and a real, unselfish desire to have them get on in the world, we do love to see our children following; admiringly, of course in our own footsteps, even though with grave Internal misgivings that they may not be able to maintain the pace or keep up the standard t'.iat we have set. It Is soothing; to have somebody that considers us iorthy of Imita tion, x So that for various reasons we have accumulate! a strong; subconscious bias In favor of having children resemble their parents and one another, which leads us to dwell upon and remember the cases In which the rule came true and to overlook or forget the usually much more numerous exceptions. As a matter of fact. It would take a wise . man. a very oracle, to decide which Is the mora striking the extent to which children resemble their parents and one another or the degree to which they differ from one another. Thre Is such a thing, unquestionably, as family like ness and the Inheritance of family characteristics and the traits from one generation to another. But there Is also a very large amount of family unlikeness children who rise strik ingly above or fall distressingly below the level of their brothers and sisters and of their family group. Which should be considered the rule, and which the exception? One thing has unquestionably greatly warped our Judgment and clouded our vision In re-card to this question, and that Is Illustrations drawn from plants and from the lower animals. Many, many generations ago came the self-answertna- question: "Do men leather grapes of thorns or fss of thistles?" From docs, come only dogs and not lions: from sheep, sheep, snd from mwm mMS,mm few? $$H8i goats, goats. Therefore, taking for granted th: t a man as he stands is as simple a complex as a dog- or a cow or a sheep, with childish logic we de clare that from such an such a man will be born only such and such chil dren. Or. If we take the mother Into account at all. we l!l say that the children are half father, half mother, and consequently, for all practical pur poses, will be Just alike. Hut thla comparison between family likeness In man and in animals, though parallel In a sense. Is really most de ceiving In its usual applications. Ani mals of the same species in a state of nature are so much more uniform and nearly alike than are human beings. They are all. practically, to the casual eye. exactly of the same color, varying only a few Indefinite shades of brown or gray. Indeed, the name of a spe cies Is adopted as the name of a color, as when we speak of "mouse-colored" or "fawn-colored." Their figures and limbs helnsr sDecially adapted to earn their living in a particular way, are Incidentally, biology ofTers us this of play and affection Into useful, honor almost exactly alike. Their eyes are consolation: that although there Is able, successful members of Society, all the H.me color, the patches of skin almost Infinite possibility of variation In fact, almost the only dread which which show about their noses and eyes between even children of the same we need feel is the possibility of a are exactly the same tint, and their parents, let alone of different social cropping out from some known con races, beln . based upon Jaws which are classes, this range of variation will be tamlnatlon within two or three gen mere cutting forceps for seizing prey held within the limits of the species erations. some taint of that unfortunate rrannlm arass or gnawing bark. .. . . are almost unaistin;uisnnnie irora eacn oth.-r. both In promt and expression. In fact, the divergencies and points of difference In which we count like- ne-s or unlikeness In human beings scarcely exist among animals in a state of nature. Therefore to argue, as we often !.osely do, that fro"m parents of reriain class or caste or stratum In society, or of certain inferior or supe- rlor family groups, can only be bortr and sisrae UAVL EFIT7 g children of the same class or grade of capacity or social . value because of cats are only born cats and not lions and of mice only mice, instead of beavers, is really Illogical and absurd. L e.. of normality and health at least i . . a . m aii r9 nine limes dui ui lc, 11. w SO. As nine-tenths of our human hered- ity Is to the good represents traits which have "won out" In the age-long struggle for existence (characters that make for survival) 85 to 90 per cent of all children born In every rank or class will be. In the vernacular, "per- fectly good,"l. e.. normal, wholesome, vigorous human beings, capable of de- velopment with good food and plenty v. be born-defective strain or . half-men' a.i4 nA nna ...a., m an" f Alii h II mo fl o t.n c-u,., n.i ....... - misfits), who form about 5 per cent of our population and furnish 85 per cent of our paupers, our tramps, our prosti- tutes, our criminals, our Inebriates and epileptics. Wide as is the range of the prizes in the lottery of birth, there are practically no blanks In It, If only half and quarter tickets of this description can be excluded. Another thing which has misled us M 1 1 0.2 I sssaBBssssssBssm HHBB S H M ttfft & I l Mil II the estimation of resemblances between brothers and sisters, or parents and children, has been our readiness to Jump at likenesses. A single point of similar ity, plus the identical plan of arrange ment of features which exists on all human "maps," is enough to make us declare with delight and admiration that the child is the "livin image, of his daddy," or a "pocket edition of his mother," or "a smaller sire and very moral of his older brother or sister." This tendency is most clearly and lucidly illustrated by the never-failing indoor sport of deciding "who the baby is like." A poor little 14-inch plump scrap of humanity, whose features are merely little pink and white bumps, all squeezed up together, and separated by creases, like a wrinkled-up pancake. Is declared by an admiring chorus of female relatives to have it3 father's nose and its mother's chin, when, - to the unbiased and coldly observing eye, the only recognizable difference be tween these two nubbins is in point of size; and that if you hold the youngster right side up and with care one Is above and the other below. In fact, you have to get your bearings very carefully before you can be quite sure which is which. When the upper crease in his countenance, the one above the nose nubbin, relaxes, it dis closes two eyes of a dull blue-black color, with about as much expression of individuality about them as a pair of glass marbles, and yet they are "Just like his grandyhother'sl" In later life a single striking char acter in which a child resembles its parents, or its brothers and sisters, such as red hair, blue eyes with black lashes, a prominent nose, or a thick and projecting lower lip, will be enough to fix the family likeness, and make us declare that the child is unmistak ably "his father's boy" or "his mother's son, or a Grimshaw of the Grimshaws one of the old stock." Even in the realm of history and peerage pedigrees, a single character is surprisingly often taken to mark the whole family and establish the likeness, such as the famous thick and project ing (lower) "Hapsburg Hp," which has marked for so many generations the royal houses of Spain and Austria, or the temporarily famous crumpled "Slingsby ear," which has Just won a fortune for a youthful American citi zen by proving him a true scion of & wealthy English family. Even this sin gle character is seldom or never pos sessed by all the brothers and sisters in the family or by more than 10 or 15 per cent of the entire group of each generation. But we have such a pas sion for uniformity, such a love of single identifying marks by which we can recognize race or relationships, that we are willing to accept a single character as implying likeness in all other respects. Shakespeare has expressed most graphically and picturesquely the slen derness of the evidence upon which we are ready to recognize family like nesses in the famous speech of Falstaff in the Eastcheap tavern when he Im personates the King and proceeds to administer a severe fatherly rebuke to wild Prince Hal: "Harry, thou art my son. I have partly thy mother's word, partly mine own opinion; But. chiefly a certain villainous trick of the eye and the foolish hanging of thy nether lip." Up to a comparatively short time ago we were Inclined, even as scientists, to take a rather simple and matter-of-fact view of the directness of Inheri tance from parents to children, and, consequently, of the practical identity and close similarity of the children born of the same pair of parents. To put it very crudely, from a numerical point of view, if the sum of the qualities of the father totaled 30 and those of the mother 25. that of each of the .children would be 27. If the father was black- haired and the mother fair, then the children would be brown or red-haired. If the father was tall and the mother short, then the children' would all be of medium height. Even as late as the days of Galton, the founder of the now famous sci ence of eugenics, it was supposed to be possible to represent, by a compara tively simple set of fractions, the amount of its makeup which every child inherited from its parents and ancestors I. e.. one-half from both its parents combined, one-fourth from its grandparents, one-sixteenth from its great-grandparents, one thirty-second from Its great-great-grandparents, and so on. But we very quickly found, as soon as we began to" actually count .cases and tabulate characters, that this was far too simple and alphabetic. That, instead of eight or 10, or,' at the most, 15 or 20 big characters, such as tallness or shortness, dark jor light, round-headed or long-headed, slender or sturdy, going to make up an indi vidual and determine likeness or un likeness, there were over 10-0 different characters in plain sight, and when we came to take Into account the varietiee of mind, disposition, temper, of resis tance to cold, to heat, to different kinds of climate, to disease, of digestive pe culiarities and heart vigor and lung capacity," of long-llvedness and short livedness, of all the astounding multi plicity of powers and tendencies that go to make up what we call a human being, a man, we found that the list counted up into the hundreds, if not over the thousand mark. And as two sets of these hundreds of different capacities and possibilities are brought together at each mating and soma combination of them or compromise between them is represented in each Mcfiinsai. birth, it is easy to see how complex and impossible of prediction becomes the question: What will your son, or my -daughter, be like? Indeed, we have now come to tha belief that instead of one-half of the child's makeup being contributed di rectly by the two parents, scarcely one twentieth, or possibly even one-fortieth, is so contributed, the remainder coming from ancestors long since de parted, who may have been dead hun dreds or even thousands of years. Each new-born child, in fact, is an epitome and an omelet of human his tory to date. And anything which has ever happened In the race of mankind may happen to him. TWO IVATIOXAL FOREST B "LAZES. There is the possibility of a danger ous Spring and Summer fire season in the National forests In the West, aa presaged by reports that two forest fires occurred in January. Moreover; the snowfall in much of the Hocky Mountain region and In the foothill lias been much below normal. January fires are almost unheard of in the National forests, and the snow reports are regarded as especially sig nificant, as they Indicate that unless the deficiency is made up the forests will be dry earlier in the Spring than usual, with a consequent Increase of the fire menace. The fires occurred in the Pike for est, in Colorado, and the Black Hills forest, in South Dakota, the latter be lieved to have been of Incendiary origin, according to the district for ester at Denver. About 75 acres wer burned over, all told. They were th only National forest fires reported for January. r1 '
