Homo-Culture; Or, The Improvement of Offspring Through Wiser Generation

by M. L. Holbrook

This quotation from Mr. Spencer needs a qualifying remark. Mr. Galton, in his work on Hereditary Genius, found that the average age of mothers of men of the greatest ability was about thirty, and of their fathers thirty-five. In such cases, the physical and intellectual strength must have been above the average, and, consequently, it continued to a more advanced age. Besides, those of great ability mature later.

It may also be added that Duncan's statistics, quoted by Spencer, are average statistics gathered from tables of mortality, and include every class of persons. Now, average statistics do not apply to individual cases, and they would not apply to those highly endowed physically and intellectually.

Further, those who are well endowed at birth and whose lives are in accordance with hygienic law, that is, those who do not squander their physiological resources by sensuality, by intemperance, or by excesses of any sort retain their health to a greater age than those whose lives are the reverse. Such are of a youthful physiological age, which is not altogether determined by the actual number of years they have lived, but by very high physiological conditions.

From all this we conclude that a very important rule in the production of offspring, if we would have those offspring superior, is to maintain a high degree of health—a condition in which there is a surplus of physiological capital to produce children with endowments equal to, if not superior to, their parents.

Another subject requires treatment here. It is the effect of alcohol on offspring. We are yet lacking in statistics giving the facts we need to know on this subject; but the general observation of competent persons who have had good opportunities to study it may teach us something. Alcohol, in its circulation in the blood, penetrates every part; not even the germ plasm escapes. Demme studied ten families of drinkers and ten families of temperate persons. The direct posterity of the ten families of drinkers included fifty-seven children. Of these, twenty-five died in the first weeks and months of their lives; six were idiots; in five a striking backwardness of their longitudinal growth was observed; five were affected with epilepsy, and five with inborn diseases. Thus, of the fifty-seven children of drinkers only ten, or 17.5 per cent., had normal constitutions and healthful growth. The ten sober families had sixty-one children, five only dying in the first weeks; four were affected with curable diseases of the nervous system; two only had inborn defects. The remaining fifty, 81.9 per cent., were normal in their constitutions and development.

In this statement we have a graphic object lesson of the evil effects of alcohol on the germ plasm. Natural selection had far more to do in removing those unfit to survive in the intemperate than in the temperate families.

A knowledge of the evil effects of alcohol on the unborn child was known to the ancients. The mother of Sampson was warned "not to drink any wine or strong drink nor to eat any unclean thing" because she was to conceive and bear a son who was to deliver Israel out of the hands of the Philistines. Manoah was so interested in what the angel of the Lord had said to his wife that he sought an interview with him for further confirmation, and asked: "How shall we order the child, and how shall we do unto him?" evidently meaning, "How shall we train and educate him?" and the same advice was given as before. Whatever view the reader may hold as to the inspiration or non-inspiration of the Bible, certainly this advice was good. Other examples similar to it are to be found, not only in the same book, but in numerous historical works, and also abundant evidence in our own time of the evil effects of alcoholic drinks on unborn children giving them a tendency to insanity, idiocy and other nervous diseases. A whole book might be written on this branch of our subject.

To what extent food affects the germ plasm we remain somewhat in ignorance. We know that it is from it that the body is nourished, and from it also the stored up or surplus matter in our systems is obtained. The larger the surplus the more highly will the offspring be endowed with energy is a fact clearly set forth by Mr. Spencer. A surplus of fatty food stored up in the body, however, cannot be of much service and may prove injurious. A deficiency of nitrogenous food would also, it seems to me, be an evil. The germ plasm, or its most important part, is a highly nitrogenous substance, like all protoplasm, or living matter. The highest form of germ plasm, that with a most complex molecular structure, would hardly be formed if there was a deficiency of nitrogenous matter in the blood.

Air is also food the same as bread is. The activities, the chemical changes in the body, are mainly, though not entirely, between the oxygen of the air and the carbon and hydrogen of our food. The body is quite as much injured by a deficiency of air inhaled into the lungs by exercise as by a deficiency of food, though the injury may be of a different nature. Physicians and others have long ago observed that the offspring of parents living much in the open air and sunlight are healthier and stronger than those of parents living in confined spaces, where air and light are deficient. Air which is impure, which is loaded with poisonous matter, if inhaled for a long time by the mother, lowers the standard of her health. In malarious regions, the vigor of the offspring is less, and the number who die in infancy greater, than in regions where the air and water are pure. Many years ago I remember reading in one of the journals devoted to sanitary science published in London, an account of a rural town where both air and water were of extraordinary purity, and in this town a very large percentage of the children born lived to grow to maturity. There is also an isolated region in France, bordering on the sea, where both air, water and climate are unusually salubrious, and though intermarriage has been practiced for a long time among the several thousand inhabitants, the people are remarkably well formed and healthy. Similar facts have been observed in other places. They indicate to us that a healthful climate, with good air and water, are important factors in all true stirpiculture.

While all diseases which exhaust the physiological resources of the system are detrimental to the offspring, there are certain ones which are peculiarly so. Specific diseases or those resulting from a sensual life are the first to be mentioned. If the bodies of either father or mother become saturated with the poison, which is probably a germ, then the child born of such parents will certainly be infected and either die at birth or live only a short and feeble life. It is one of the penalties of an impure life—a very severe one, no doubt, but perhaps not too severe, that the offspring of the sensualist must suffer the penalties for its parent's physiological sins. Medical men have long been trying to discover a remedy which will make it safe for a man infected with specific disease to marry and become a father, but so far they have not had much success. It is doubtful if they ever will.