In the year 1582 a William Shakespeare married an Anne Hathaway. Little is known of the progress of their union, but of their progeny, one fact is certain: Mrs. Shakespeare gave birth to twins. Doubtless this fact, if it did not inspire, at least aided the playwright in accurately describing the behavior of twins as he did in Twelfth Night, as he did again in The Comedy of Errors.
Whatever may have been the reasons for his writing about twins in these plays and others, it was a fortunate compulsion. Twins, are among the most engrossing of human phenomena. Twins are principal characters in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, brilliant best-selling novel by Thornton Wilder, himself one of twins. Almost every person includes in his acquaintance a pair of twins and contemplates their doings with delight and astonishment. For this reason, a wide interest attaches itself to a research begun last week by the University of California. Learned faculty members planned to assemble 500 pairs of twins and to study, with the utmost care, the details of their likenesses or their dissimilarities. A similar research has been announced by the University of Chicago.
Had such a research been made in the past, there would indeed have been many a strange brace of simultaneous children for scientists to study. Doubtless the savants of California wished that they could include, among their specimens:
Romulus and Remus, who were expelled from Alba with disgust and alarm and who must later have had their eccentricities increased by the diet of acidulous milk with which an undiscriminating wolf supplied them;
Castor and Pollux, who were the products of Jupiter's miraculously unconventional affection for Leda and who were worshipped, by credulous Greeks, on account of their coincidental birth as well as their divine paternity;
The Gordon brothers, British soldiers, who entered the army on the same day, became full generals on the same day, received the K. C. B. at about the same time, who were authorities on the customs and conditions of India, where they were stationed and where they were famed as the "Gemini Generals."
Nor would the scientists have scorned such contemporary couples as:
The Sharp twins, Summers H. and George of West Virginia, politicians also, whose mutual affection is state-known;
The Dolly Sisters and others who, sometimes dishonestly, have claimed twinship for exploitation in circus and theatre.
The most notable living family of twins in the U. S. was produced by Mrs. Andrew Koger of Council Bluffs, Iowa, and her husband, Andrew Koger, carpenter. They have four sets of twins healthy and growing, named, according to the unfortunate habit of emphasizing the abnormality of twinship by imposing artificial likenesses, Clyde, Claude, Addie, Abbie, Floyd, Lloyd, Jean and Jeannette.
Present knowledge of twins and twinship may be grouped under two heads:
Physical. In the genus homo there are three kinds of twins, Fraternal, Identical, Siamese. Fraternal twins are twins in time only. They make their entry into the world together but are completely separate individuals, the product of two fertilized eggs, having separate fetal membranes, not necessarily of the same sex, and as different biologically as any two members of the family born at different times. The young of most animals that produce litters are like fraternal twins; a fertilized egg for each animal.