Читать книгу The Mother and Her Child - Lena K. Sadler - Страница 29

Probably none of the laboriously acquired accomplishments of the present generation can be directly—and as such—handed down to our children. What we are to be and what we will do in this world was largely determined by the laws of heredity by the time we were well started on our development experience en-utero during the third or fourth week of our prenatal existence, as outlined in a former chapter.

It is now generally accepted in scientific circles that acquired characteristics are not transmissible. Someone has aptly stated this truth by saying that "wooden heads are inherited, but wooden legs are not." This does not by any means imply that we do not have power and ability to fashion our careers and carve out our own destiny, within the possible bounds of our hereditary endowment and environmental surroundings. Heredity does determine our "capital stock," but our own efforts and acts determine the interest and increase which we may derive from our natural endowment. From the moment conception takes place—the very instant when the two sex cells meet and blend—then and there "the gates of heredity are forever closed." From that time on we are dealing with the problems of nutrition, development, education, and environment; therefore, so-called prenatal influence can have nothing whatever to do with heredity.

A father may have acquired great talent as a physician or a surgeon, in fact he may hold the chair of surgery in a medical college, but each of his children come into the world without the slightest knowledge of the subject, and, as far as direct and immediate heredity is concerned, will have to work just about as hard to master the subject as will the same average class of children whose parents were not surgeons. This must not be taken to mean that certain abilities and tendencies are not inheritable—for they are; but they are inherited through the parents—and not from them—directly. These transmitted characteristics are largely "stock" traits, and usually have long been present in the "ancestral strain."