ABSTRACT
Summing up the results of a major recent conference on heredity, two historians of science concluded that “no general concept of heredity was underlying the discourse on life (including medicine, anthropology and the moral sciences) in the eighteenth century and that such a concept was only slowly emerging in the first half of the nineteenth century” (Rheinberger and Müller-Wille 3). Environmental accounts of people, plants, and animals dominated eighteenth-century writing, with some scientific authorities arguing that culture could change one species of grain into another and accounting for the resemblance between a child and its father by invoking a maternal imagination so powerful (according to the 1684 sex-advice manual Aristoteles Master-Piece) “that though a Woman be in unlawful Copulation, yet if fear or any thing else causes her to fix her mind upon her husband, the Child will resemble him, tho’ he never got it” (25). Meanwhile, theorists of education from Locke to Rousseau emphasized the power of education to transform the self, and most writers concluded that external influences (described in a constellation of terms that include habit, custom, and climate) rather than any nature inherent to the individual had the most profound effects in determining that person’s character.
