One head master
used to say he would never flog the innocent for the guilty, and the
other used to flog them both.'
"No less than nine anecdotes have reached me of a twin seeing his or her
reflection in the looking-glass, and addressing it in the belief that it
was the other twin in person.
"Children are usually quick in distinguishing between their parent and
his or her twin; but I have two cases to the contrary. Thus, the
daughter of a twin says:
"'Such was the marvelous similarity of their features, voice, manner,
etc., that I remember, as a child, being very much puzzled, and I think,
had my aunt lived much with us, I should have ended by thinking I had
two mothers!'
"In the other case, a father who was a twin, remarks of himself and his
brother:
"'We were extremely alike, and are so at this moment, so much so that
our children up to five and six years old did not know us apart.'
"Among my thirty-five detailed cases of close similarity, there are no
less than seven in which both twins suffered from some special ailment
or had some exceptional peculiarity. Both twins are apt to sicken at the
same time in no less than nine out of the thirty-five cases. Either
their illnesses, to which I refer, were non-contagious, or, if
contagious, the twins caught them simultaneously; they did not catch
them the one from the other.
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