[282] Compare Bulletins de la Société d’Anthropologie, vol. iii, p. 175.
[283] In applying these principles to family consanguinity, we may say in a general manner, that it will be favourable or not to the offspring according to the state of the parents. If the parents are perfectly healthy, and exempt from all commencing degeneracy, they can only give birth to children at least as healthy as themselves. If one of the two parents is tainted with a commencement of degeneracy, the descendant, in his quality of offspring, will perhaps bear the trace of this degeneracy, but sensibly weakened. If the two parents are separately tainted with a different commencement of degeneracy, one or the other ought to continue it in the child, only in a lesser degree. But if the same degeneracy has already tainted both the parents, the offspring will show it in a greater degree, and will tend towards entire disappearance.
[284] Flourens, Histoire des Travaux de Buffon, p. 180.
[285] [On the Phenomena of Hybridity in the Genus Homo, edited by C. Carter Blake, F.G.S., F.A.S.L.—Editor.]
[286] Compare G. Pouchet, Précis d’Histologie Humaine, § 5.
[287] “Ac Sylla quidem sodalis noster, fatus nos parva quæstione tanquam instrumento ingentem et gravem de origine mundi quæstionem subruere.” Quæstionem Convivalium, book ii, quest. 3; transl., edited by F. Didot, 1841.
[288] Buffon said that (Suppléments, vol. iv, p. 335) this method of generation is not only the most frequent and the most general, but the most ancient, that is, the first and most universal one. Plutarch (Quæst. Conviv., book ii, quest. 3; transl., edited by F. Didot, 1841) makes the same remark: “Proinde probabile est primum ortum ex terra gignentis perfectione ac robore absolutum fuisse, nihilque indigentem hujusmodi instrumentis, receptaculis et vasis, qualia nunc ob imbecillitatem natura parit atque machinatur parientibus.”
[289] It must not be forgotten, that organic substances are supposed to have been found even in the formation of certain aërolites.
[290] É. Geoffroy, Comptes Rendus des séances de l’Académie des Sciences, vol. v, p. 193.
[291] See Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Histoire Naturelle Générale, vol. iii, p. 210.