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History of Twins
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at school, and as children visiting their friends, they always went together.”
(7.) “They have been treated exactly alike; both were brought up by hand;
they have been under the same nurse and governess from their birth, and they are
very fond of each other. Their increasing dissimilarity must be ascribed to a
natural difference of mind and character, as there has been nothing in their
treatment to account for it.”
(8.) “They are as different as possible. [A minute and unsparing analysis of
the characters of the two twins is given by their father, most instructive to read,
but impossible to publish without the certainty of wounding the feelings of one of
the twins, if these pages should chance to fall under his eyes.] They were brought
up entirely by hand, that is, on cow’s milk, and treated by one nurse in precisely
the same manner.”
(9.) “The home-training and influence were precisely the same, and therefore
I consider the dissimilarity to be accounted for almost entirely by innate
disposition and by causes over which we have no control.”
(10.) “This case is, I should think, somewhat remarkable for dissimilarity in
physique as well as for strong contrast in character. They have been unlike in
body and mind throughout their lives. Both were reared in a country house, and
both were at the same schools till aet. 16."
(11). “Singularly unlike in body and mind from babyhood; in looks,
dispositions, and tastes they are quite different. I think I may say the dissimilarity
was innate, and developed more by time than circumstance.”
(12.) “We were never in the least degree alike. I should say my sister’s and
my own character are diametrically opposed, and have been utterly different from
our birth, though a very strong affection subsists between us.”
(13.) The father remarks :—“ They were curiously different in body and mind
from their birth.” The surviving twin (a senior wrangler of Cambridge) adds “A
fact struck all our school contemporaries, that my brother and I were
complementary so to speak, in point of ability and disposition. He was
contemplative, poetical, and literary to a remarkable degree, showing great power
in that line. I was practical, mathematical, and linguistic. Between us we should
have made a very decent sort of a man.”
I could quote others just as strong as these, in some of which the above
phrase “complementary” also appears, while I have not a single case in
which my correspondents speak of originally dissimilar characters having
become assim
