156 galton.org
156
Inquiries into Human Faculty
whether they subsequently grew unlike, and, if so, what the main causes
were which, in the opinion of the family, produced the dissimilarity. In
this way we can obtain direct evidence of the kind we want. Again, we
may obtain yet more valuable evidence by a converse method. We can
inquire into the history of twins who were exceedingly unlike in
childhood, and learn how far their characters became assimilated under
the influence of identical nurture, is as much as they had the same home,
the same teachers, the same associates, and in every other respect the
same surroundings.
My materials were obtained by sending circulars of inquiry to persons
who were either twins themselves or near relations of twins. The printed
questions were in thirteen groups; the last of them asked for the addresses
of other twins known to the recipient, who might be likely to respond if I
wrote to them. This happily led to a continually widening circle of
correspondence, which I pursued until enough material was accumulated
for a general reconnaisance of the subject.
There is a large literature relating to twins in their purely surgical and
physiological aspect. The reader interested in this should consult Die
Lehre von den Zwillingen, von L. Kleinwächter, Prag. 1871. It is full of
references, but it is also unhappily disfigured by a number of numerical
misprints, especially in page 26. I have not found any book that treats of
twins from my present point of view.
The reader will easily understand that the word “twins” is a vague
expression, which covers two very dissimilar events—the one
corresponding to the progeny of animals that usually bear more than one
at a birth, each of the progeny being derived from a separate ovum, while
the other event is due to the development of two germinal spots in the
same ovum. In the latter case they are-enveloped in the same membrane,
and all such twins are found invariably to be of the same sex. The
consequence of this is, that I find a curious discontinuity in my results.
One would have expected that twins would commonly be found to possess
a certain average likeness to one another; that a few would greatly exceed
that average likeness, and a few would greatly fall short of it. But this is
not at all the case. Extreme
