[253] Hereditary Genius, 1868.
[254] L’Hérédité Psychologique, 1878.
[255] Biographie Universelle des Musiciens.
[256] Ribot in his L’Hérédité Psychologique refers to French statistics of 1861 according to which in 1000 lunatics of each sex, there was hereditary influence in 264 men and in 266 women.
[257] Galton himself remarks that of 31 great families of lawyers raised to the peerage before the end of the reign of George IV., twelve are extinct, especially those which contracted alliances with heiresses. Out of 487 families admitted to citizenship at Berne from 1583 to 1654 only 168 remained in 1783. “When a grandee of Spain is announced we expect to see an abortion” (Ribot, De l’Hérédité, p. 820). The French and Italian nobility to-day has become for the most part an inert instrument in the hands of the clergy. And how many of the sovereigns of Europe yet preserve those ancestral virtues to the presumed transmission of which they owe in large part their throne and prestige?
[258] Dante, Purgatorio, canto vii.
[259] Lucas, De l’Hérédité.
[260] Ribot, L’Hérédité Psychologique.
[261] Dugdale, The Jukes.
[262] Académie des Sciences, 1871. Five cases of epilepsy, and of insanity, two of general paralysis, one of idiocy and several of microcephaly were observed under these circumstances. The microcephalic condition which so often appears among the hereditary results of alcoholism may be understood when we recall the atrophies, the cerebral scleroses (a kind of histologic microcephaly) which are so constantly found in the drunkard himself.