THE NATURAL LAWS OF MARRIAGE, AND OF THE TEMPERAMENTS.
It is well known that marriages between near relatives produce unhealthy and imperfect children, but the causes of such a result are not generally understood. These causes extend far beyond the circle of a family, for it is quite as improper for two persons of the same temperament to marry, as it would be for a brother and a sister. The laws of the Temperaments of the human family may be enumerated as follows:
1st. When both parties to a marriage are constitutionally the same, there will probably be no children.
2d. The vital elements are incompatible with each other, and if children are born to parents who are alike in this respect, they will probably be idiotic, or rachitic.[1]
3d. When parties who marry are nearly alike—if their temperaments differ only in part—they will have children who may live to adult age, but who will then probably die of tubercular phthisis (consumption). In illustration of this, I have known whole families of children to be taken off by consumption between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-seven years, where this disease had not previously existed in the families of the parents or their progenitors.
4th. If the constitutions of a married couple assimilate to the extent of one-half, their children will be apt to die before the first seven years. The diseases of such children are tubercles in the glands of the intestines, or in the membranes of the brain.
5th. When persons marry who are alike in temperament, and whose constitutions materially differ, a majority of their children will be still-born, and none will probably live to be two years old.
6th. When one of the parties to a marriage is exclusively vital, and the other similar, but of a nervous and melancholy turn, the children will generally be promising.
7th. To produce smart and healthy children, one of the parties should be of sanguine-bilious temperament, with good vitality, and the other of a quiet, lymphatic turn.
Scrofulous forms of disease result exclusively from marriages illustrated by the first five laws above given. More than half the children that die are those of constitutionally incompatible parents. People who live in health to a good old age, owe more to their parents giving them a sound constitution than to any efforts of their own to preserve health. So many diseases are traced by skillful physicians to improper marriages, that the study of Physiology, and of the human temperaments, seems to be as necessary to young people as the most common branches of education.