Idiosyncrasy

Every man, in the true Greek sense of the term, is an idiosyncrasy. He is a syncrasis, because he derives all his attributes, physical or mental, from two parents, or four grandparents, or eight great-grandparents, and so forth. But at the same time he is an idio-syncrasis, because that particular mixture is eminently unlikely ever to have occurred before, or ever to occur again, even in his own brothers or sisters. That he is and can be at birth nothing more than such a crasis, that he cannot conceivably contain anything more, on the mental side at least, than was contained in his antecedents, is the thesis which this paper sets out to maintain.

Take a thousand red beans and a thousand white beans; shake them all up in a bag together for five minutes, and then pour them out in a square space on a billiard-table just big enough to contain them in a layer one deep. Each time you do so, your product will be the same in general outline and appearance: it will be a quadrangular figure composed of beans, having throughout the same approximate thickness. But it will be a mixture of red beans and white in a certain order; and the chances against the same order occurring twice will be very great indeed. Make the beans ten thousand of each so as to cover the table ten deep, and the chance of getting the same order twice decreases proportionately. Make them a hundred thousand each, and it becomes infinitesimal. You have practically each time not only a synerasis but an idio-syncrasis as well.

Now, a human being is the product of innumerable elements, derived directly from two parents, and indirectly from an infinity of earlier ancestors; elements not of two orders only, but of infinite orders; combined together, apparently, not on the principle of both contributing equally to each part, but of a sort of struggle between the two for the mastery in each part. Here, elements derived from the father's side seem to carry the day; there, again, elements derived from the mother's side gain the victory; and yonder, once more, a compromise has been arrived at between the two, so that the offspring in that particular part is a mean of his paternal and maternal antecedents...

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen (February 24, 1848 – October 25, 1899) was a Canadian science writer and novelist, educated in England. He was a public promoter of evolution in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Ely Van de Warker (1841–1910) American gynecologist