Considerations with regard to Hereditary Influence

Extract

Passing on from the consideration of influences which, before an individual's birth, and during the act of his generation, seem to have much to do with the determination of his destiny, it remains only to indicate the circumstances which may affect his nature during embryonic life. And although the effects which may then be produced are not truly hereditary, but in strict language connate, it is generally quite impossible to discriminate between them and such as are really inherited. There is no need to quote here any of the multitude of examples on record, testifying to the influence of the mother upon the embryo during gestation. It might be amusing, but it would scarce be profitable, to relate how that when Persina, Queen of Ethiopia, as Heliodorus tells, saw a very beautiful image of Andromeda, she brought forth a child, which was not only not an Ethiopian, but which was very like the image; how that children were born during the French Revolution who, as they grew up, were subject to unnatural terrors, and easily became insane, as Esquirol witnesses; and how that Hippocrates saved a woman who had a black child of a white husband, and who was thereupon accused of adultery, by attributing the result to the portrait of an Ethiopian on which the woman had gazed. Suffice it to say, that the direct influence of the mother's state of mind upon the embryo, has been popularly accepted at all times. Good use was made of the fact by the Jewish patriarch, who certainly never lacked advancement from want of worldly cunning, when he peeled the rods and “set them up before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs, when the flocks came to drink,” so that the flocks “brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted,” “and the man increased exceedingly.”