PARENTHOOD AND CHARACTER

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1336, 13 January 1912, Page 15

PARENTHOOD AND CHARACTER

f I Dr. Alexander Hill gave a kcture on "Man Under the Microscope" at the London Institution on November 27. He said that the invisible population of the world was more important than the population that was seen. If it were not l'or minute organisms or bacteria tlio surfaco of the earth . would long ago have been hidden out of sight beneath tho carcasses of animals that had fallen, and the seas would have been choked by the fishes that had existed since tho days of the Old lied Sandstone. It did not seem fair on Nature's part to allow the depredations of bacteria in tho, human body, but that was the result of our own carelessness in tho use of dirty water and milk or fly-affected, food. Eighty years ago tho death-rate of our soldiers in the West Indies was one in ten, but to-day, owing to our increased knowledge, yellow fever was a pathological curiosity, cholera did not exist, malaria could bo stamped out, and tho West Indies were rapidly becoming the sanatoria which Nature intended them to be. Pointing out that every living thing—'whether a fungus or a fir-tree, a cheese-mito or a hunian being—began its existence as a _ single cell, I)r. Hill said that the individual hunian being was not the owner, but merely the trustee, of his offspring. If a child had some of the characteristics of his father or of his mother, it was because he was predestined boforo liis parents were born to exhibit, the characteristics of the race. ' He took after his father or his mother because he had more of the characteristics of the 0110 than of the other. If his father were colourblind, ho was not half colour-blind; either he saw colours as his mother saw them or not at all; he was not a blend of the two. Mendel, the Austrian monk, had shown that all characters_ were either positive or negative; but it was only in the ease of domestic animals, or of cultivated flowers in which some characteristics had been so exaggerated as to I become consoicuons. that we could lest : the truth nf'his great generalisation. In the seed cell were shadowed forth all the potentialities of the future individualblack hair, blue eyes, or long nose. How it came about we did not know, but the guesses of men of science were littlo more than children's fancies. Only a few 1 years ago doctors preaclicd the awful docI of predomination to disease and of I tho child to the vices of his parents, but opinions had changed on that point. v\ o believed in heroditv, not of tho individual but of the race. Tho individual started fair and without those tendencies, _ and therefore lie might, by judicious measures, bo protected from thorn.