Ruminations from the Cold Spring

by Cold Spring

Ruminations is a text from the Shogunate, by the scholar of Medicine and bloodlines known as Cold Spring. The text is lengthy and wordy, but is considered one of the key texts in the modern study of 'eugenics' for Dragonblooded breeding, as well as more mundane breeding programs for animals and mortals. Some have even pushed for its adoption as a guide for the Immaculate Order and Thousand Scales determining which peasant and citizen marriages are to be authorized, though this had never come to pass under the Empress' rule.

Selected Quotations

"...the individual is the arithmetic mean of ancestral quantities:

his father and mother,

and the whole species of maternal and paternal ancestors,

going back in a double series to the very beginnings of all life..."

"Those who marry for position or wealth know not how to marry.

Nature endures, wealth is fleeting.

Is it not therefore the duty of the one who takes good counsel to marry the noble,

and to give in marriage among the noble, and to have no

desire for an evil wedlock,

even if one should thereby win a wealthy dower?"

"I begin with man's birth, showing how he may become best and strongest in body,

if the father trains and undergoes hardship,

and the future mother is strong and also trains."

"To form a child from birth to the best constitution, first of all care must be taken of the seed itself,

then of food, drink, exercise, quiet, sleep, desires, and other

things, all of which I have carefully studied."