ruck with the resemblance, and
noticed particularly that the hair had the qualities characteristic of
the negro.' Herbert Spencer got a letter from a 'distinguished
correspondent' in the United States, who said that children by white
parents had been 'repeatedly' observed to show traces of black blood
when the women had had previous connection with (i.e., a child by) a
negro. Dr. Youmans of New York interviewed several medical professors,
who said the above was 'generally accepted as a fact.' Prof. Austin
Flint, in 'A Text-book of Human Physiology,' mentioned this fact, and
when asked about it said: 'He had never heard the statement questioned.'

"But it is not only in relation to color that we find telegony to have
been noticed in the human subject. Dr. Middleton Michel gives a most
interesting case in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences for
1868: 'A black woman, mother of several negro children, none of whom
were deformed in any particular, had illicit intercourse with a white
man, by whom she became pregnant. During gestation she manifested great
uneasiness of mind, lest the birth of a mulatto offspring should
disclose her conduct.... It so happened that her negro husband
possessed a sixth digit on each hand, but there was no peculiarity of
any kind in the white man, yet when the mulatto child was born it
actually presented the deformity of a supernumerary finger.' Taruffi,
the celebrated Italian teratologist, in speaking of the subject, says:
'Our knowledge of this strange fact is by no means recent for Fienus,
in 1608, said that most of the children born in adultery have a greater
resemblance to the legal than to the real father'--an observation that
was confirmed by the philosopher Vanini and by the naturalist
Ambrosini. From these observations comes the proverb: 'Filium ex
adultera excusare matrem a culpa.' Osiander has noted telegony in
relation to moral qualities of children by a second marriage. Harvey
said that it has long been known that the children by a second husband
resemble the first husband in features mind, and disposition. He then
gave a case in which this resemblance was very well marked. Orton,
Burdach (Traite de Physiologie), and Dr. William Sedgwick have all
remarked on this physical resemblance; and Dr. Metcalfe, in a
dissertation delivered before this society in 1855, observed that in
the cases of widows remarrying the children of the second marriage
frequently resemble the first husb