The body-cells are greatly changed by disease, poison, injury, and overwork, but these changes are not passed on, and despite the influence of disease from time immemorial, the germ-cell produces the same man as in ancient days. Without this fixity of character, this "continuity of the germ-plasm", "man" would cease to be, for the descendants of changeable cells would be of infinite variety, having fixity of neither form nor character.
Epilepsy, hysteria and neurasthenia are all outward signs of defect in the germ-plasm, and so they (or a predisposition to them) can be passed on, and inherited.
If a man shows a certain character, his plasm, had, and has, the causative factor. He may have received it from both his parents, when it will be strong, or from one only, when it will be normal. If he have it not, it is absent. The same applies to the plasm of the woman he mates, so there are six possible combinations, with results according to "Mendel's Law."
All the children will not inherit a taint unless both parents possess it, but, however strong one parent be, if the other is tainted, none of the children can be absolutely clean, but will show the taint, weak, strong, or dormant. This means that neuropathy will recur—and
that it has previously occurred—in the same family, unless there be continual mating into sound stocks. If there is continual mating into bad stocks, it will recur frequently and in severe forms. All intermediate stages may occur, depending entirely on the qualities of the combining stocks.
From this we shall expect, in the same stock, signs of neuropathic taint other than the three diseases dealt with here, and these we get; for alcoholism, criminality, chorea, deformities, insanity and other brain diseases, are not infrequent among the relatives of a neuropath, showing that the family germ-plasm is unsound.
Epilepsy, one symptom of taint, is more or less interchangeable with other defects; the taint, as a whole, is an inheritable unit whose inheritance will appear as any one of many defects. This is shown by the fact that very few epileptics have an epileptic parent. Starr's analysis of 700 cases of epilepsy emphasizes this point.
| Epilepsy in a parent | 6 |
| Epilepsy in a near relative | 136 |
| Alcoholism in a parent | 120 |
| Nervous Diseases in family | 118 |
| Rheumatism and Tuberculosis | 184 |
| Combinations of above diseases | 142 |
As medicine and surgery cannot add or delete plasmic factors, the only way to stamp out neuropathy in severe forms would be to sterilize victims by X-rays. This would be painless, would protect the race and not interfere with personal or even with sexual liberty. In fifty years such diseases would be almost extinct, and those arising from accident or the chance union of dormant factors in apparently normal people could easily be dealt with.