Enough has been said to prove that an extremely close personal
resemblance frequently exists between twins of the same sex; and that,
although the resemblance usually diminishes as they grow into manhood
and womanhood, some cases occur in which the resemblance is lessened in
a hardly perceptible degree. It must be borne in mind that the
divergence of development, when it occurs, need not be ascribed to the
effect of different nurtures, but that it is quite possible that it may
be due to the appearance of qualities inherited at birth, though
dormant, like gout, in early life. To this I shall recur.
There is a curious feature in the character of the resemblance between
twins, which has been alluded to by a few correspondents: it is well
illustrated by the following quotations. A mother of twins says: "There
seems to be a sort of interchangeable likeness in expression, that often
gave to each the affect of being more like his brother than himself."
Again, two twin brothers, writing to me, after analysing their points of
resemblance, which are close and numerous, and pointing out certain
shades of difference, add: "These seem to have marked us through life,
though for a while when we were first separated, the one to go to
business, and the other to college, our respective characters were
inverted; we both think that at that time we each ran into the character
of the other. The proof of this consists in our own recollections, in
our correspondence by letter, and in the views which we then took of
matters in which we were interested." In explanation of this apparent
interchangeableness, we must recollect that no character is simple, and
that in twins who strongly resemble each other every expression in the
one may be matched by a corresponding expression in the other, but it
does not follow that the same expression should be the dominant one in
both cases. Now it is by their dominant expressions that we should
distinguish between the twins; consequently when one twin has
temporarily the expression which is the dominant one in his brother, he
is apt to be mistaken for him. There are also cases where the
development of the two twins is not strictly by equal steps; they reach
the same goal at the same time, but not by identical stages. Thus: A is
born the larger, then B overtakes and surpasses A, the end being that
the twins become closely alike. This process would aid in giving an
interchangeable likeness at certain periods of their growth, and is
undoubtedly due to nature more frequently than to nurture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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