Private Sex Advice to Women: For Young Wives and those who Expect to be MarriedArmitage, Robert B.
Science
Private Sex Advice to Women: For Young Wives and those who Expect to be Married
Armitage, Robert B.
Marriage; Sex instruction; Women -- Health and hygiene
"Inheritance of moral character is well known. Heredity, in its relation
to crime and pauperism, has been thoroughly investigated by Mr. Dugdale
in his most instructive little work entitled "The Jukes." In this work
the descendants of one vicious and neglected girl are traced through a
large number of generations. It reveals that a large proportion of the
descendants of this woman became licentious, for, in the course of six
generations, fifty-two percent of the children were illegitimate. It
shows also that there were seven times more paupers among the women than
among the average women of the state, and nine times more paupers among
the male descendants than among the average men of the state. The
inheritance of physical peculiarities is so obvious as to need no
illustration. Among the ancients the Romans stereotyped its truth by the
use of such expressions as 'the labiones' or thick-lipped; 'the
nasones,' or big-nosed; 'the capitones,' or big-headed, and 'the
buccones,' or swollen-cheeked, etc. In more recent times we read of the
Austrian lip and the Bourbon nose."
But in all considerations of the subject of heredity, one must always
remember that the inheritance of physical, mental, and moral
characteristics is not alone from the immediate parents, but rather from
many ancestors further removed in order and time. Back of each person
there is a long line of paternal and maternal ancestors, extending back
to the beginning of the race. And in that line there are influences for
good and evil, awaiting favorable environment for awakening into new
life unless restrained by the will of the individual.
As Shute says: "There will come a time when the fertilized ovum will
have a highly complex nucleus composed of many different ancestral
groups of hereditary units. One often hears the expression that a child
is a chip of the old block; but this is only a very partial truth, for
the child is pre-eminently a composite chip of many old blocks." And
Luther Burbank has well said: "Heredity means much; but what is
heredity? Not some hideous ancestral spectre, forever crossing the path
of a human being. Heredity is simply the sum of all the environments of
all past generations on the responsive ever-moving life-forces."
Transmission of Acquired Characteristics.
One of the great disputes of biology is that concerning the question of
whether or not parents may transmit to their offspring their personal
"acquired characteristics" as well as those inherited from their line of
ancestors. One side of the controversy points to the observed cases of
children and grandchildren resembling each other, physically, mentally,
and morally, in acquired characteristics; but the other side explains
these facts as due to environment rather than to heredity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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