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Show THE INFLUENCE OF HEREDITY. A letter printed in The Tribune on Tuesday morning from the vicinity of the old home of James M. Shockley, the confessed murderer of the two streetcar street-car men In this city, raises anew the question of hereditary tendencies to crime. That there is such heredity has been abundantly proved by the annals of criminology. And that vicious blood is a plague to humanity is as well attested at-tested In human experience as In the cold records of the officers of the law. Some years ago the case of an old woman wo-man was prominently before the public; pub-lic; she was a vicious character herself, her-self, and her offspring to the fourth generation had been vile, something like two hundred of them having been traced and found to be vile and criminal. crim-inal. ' Similarly in this case, the tendency to crime is said to have come from his mother, and Instances are given of criminals on her side of the house enough to establish a vicious strain of blood. Shockley himself began his career ca-reer by stealing from his father and sister; sis-ter; and the letter shrewdly surmises that for the five years since then he has been engaged in n career of crime. That Is precisely what the record oC the man Is, so far as It has been ascertained. ascer-tained. The laws of heredity, so far as they are known, are not altogether conclusive, conclu-sive, or probably it would be better to say that all the laws and cross-strains are uncertainly known. The contention that vicious tendencies can be overcome Is sometimes apparently borne out, but possibly the vicious tendencies had been neutralized, apd did not in fact exist In such prominence as to become active; another strain of heredity, bearing powerful moral restraints, may have some in that could not be traced. The harking back to some remote ancestor, male or female, Is a well-known occurrence occur-rence in psychology. The whole subject, as a matter of fact, is obscure, and only its most direct and positive manifestations manifesta-tions can be traced. The different strains of blood and tendencies need to be. traced back for generations before anything definite can be predicated upon apparent facts. Usually, this is Impracticable. Imprac-ticable. But recently an expert In the Popular Sclonce Monthly had a series of articles tracing the mingled blood of some of the reigning houses of Europe; and he was able, to arrive at some satis sat-is factory results in tracing the incoming incom-ing of diseased and special tendencies of mlnd'in tho rulers. It was a most interesting study, and while not conclusive, con-clusive, it certainly showed where tho families had obtained certain traits not observable in them before, and had these traits (many of them evil, some brilliant) had been transmitted to progeny. prog-eny. And yet, back of all, is the question ques-tion whore thoi traits come from in tho first place, and how it comes that certain propensities are eliminated from some strains of blood and retained in others. And in general, the different or opposite tendencies of children in tho same family brother compared with brother and sister with slutcr remain largely unaccounted for. There was a play presented recently at tho Theater In this city which raised one phase of this general question of heredity. A young man, son of a drunkard and debauchee, was represented repre-sented as an Inevitable victim of heredity, and as being threatened with softening of the brain, with scarcely scarce-ly a hope of relief. The mother was pure and strong, a noble woman. But in tho s&mc play was a daughter ot the same man, younger, whose mother was in no way equal to the mother of tho j'oung man; but this girl was a model of beauty, strength and grace, though her father had kept along in his career of vice and degradation, degrada-tion, and the girl, by all known rules of that form of heredity, ought to have been as far inferior to the boy as she Avas In fact superior. The lesson sought to be Inculcated by the play was thus annulled by the play Itself. Yet the play was both artistic and natural for all that, for this Is precisely what may happen, and even with the same mother in both cases. Thus, there are many mysteries connected con-nected with this whole subject; but some things seem direct and plain; and among these is the transmission of criminal tendencies, as appears In this case of Shockley, Illustrated by the crimes traced to the relatives of his mother, and to him as her offspring. |