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Inquiries into Human Faculty
I have a few anecdotes of strange mistakes made between twins in
adult life. Thus, an officer writes
“On one occasion when I returned from foreign service my father turned to me and
said, ‘I thought you were in London,’ thinking I was my brother—yet he had not seen me
for nearly four years—our resemblance was so great.”
The next and last anecdote I shall give is, perhaps, the most remarkable
of those I have; it was sent me by the brother of the twins, who were in
middle life at the time of its occurrence
“A was again coming home from India, on leave; the ship did not arrive for some days
after it was due; the twin brother B had come up from his quarters to receive A, and their
old mother was very nervous. One morning A rushed in saying, ‘Oh, mother, how are
you?’ Her answer was, ‘No, B, it’s a bad joke; you know how anxious I am!’ and it was a
little time before A could persuade her that he was the real man.”
Enough has been said to prove that an extremely close personal
resemblance frequently exists between twins of the same sex; and that,
although the resemblance usually diminishes as they grow into manhood
and womanhood, some cases occur in which the diminution of
resemblance is hardly perceptible. It must be borne in mind that it is not
necessary to ascribe the divergence of development, when it occurs, to the
effect of different nurtures, but it is quite possible that it may be due to the
late appearance of qualities inherited at birth, though dormant in- early
life, like gout. To this I shall recur.
There is a curious feature in the character of the resemblance between
twins, which has been alluded to by a few correspondents; it is well
illustrated by the following quotations. A mother of twins says
“There seemed to be a sort of interchangeable likeness in expression, that often gave to
each the effect of being more like his brother than himself.”
Again, two twin brothers, writing to me, after analysing their points of
resemblance, which are close and numerous, and pointing out certain
shades of difference, add—
“These seem to have marked us through life, though for a while, when we were first
separated, the one to go to business,
