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DEGENERACY

DWARFISM AND GIANTISM.

Degeneracy

ITS CAUSES, SIGNS, AND RESULTS

BY
EUGENE S. TALBOT, M.D., D.D.S.,

FELLOW OF THE CHICAGO ACADEMY OF MEDICINE; MEMBER OF THE CHICAGO
ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; HONORARY MEMBER OF THE BERLIN
ODONTOLOGISCHEN GESELLSCHAFT, AND THE ASSOCIATION
GÉNÉRALE DES DENTISTES DE FRANCE; PROFESSOR OF
DENTAL AND ORAL SURGERY, WOMAN’S MEDICAL
SCHOOL, NORTH-WESTERN UNIVERSITY, U.S.A.

WITH 120 ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON
WALTER SCOTT, LTD., PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1898

PREFACE

The present work is the result of more than twenty years’ labour in a limited medical department of biology. It demonstrates once more the truth of the scientific principle, that the truth or falsity of any theory or working hypothesis becomes more and more demonstrable the further its application is attempted in the explanation of new lines of facts. The truth of the degeneracy doctrine had forced itself on the writer long before its popular apotheosis under Lombroso and Nordau, because it alone sufficed for an explanation of constitutional and local defects (encountered in a seemingly limited speciality of medicine), which local causes failed entirely to explain. The investigations thereon resultant have appeared in medical and dental journals for the past two decades. The present work is chiefly based on these researches. At the same time, the author has drawn largely from all fields of biology cultivated by European investigators, while he must acknowledge a particular indebtedness to the investigations (of which he has made large use beside that elsewhere specifically acknowledged) of certain American investigators—Rush, Parkmen, Ray, G. Frank Lydston, C. L. Dana, C. F. Folsom, W. W. Godding, E. C. Spitzka, E. D. Cope, D. R. Brower, Marsh, B. Sachs, Harriet C. B. Alexander, Clara Barrus, H. M. Bannister, Delia E. Howe, Grace Peckham, Adolph Meyer, Kerlin, Wiley, J. G. Kiernan, W. E. Allison, Osborn, R. Dewey, Frederick Peterson, Gihon, Cowles, W. A. Hammond, A. B. Holder, C. H. Hughes, F. W. Starr, F. C. Hoyt, J. H. McBride, C. K. Mills, C. B. Burr, T. D. Crothers, W. S. Christopher, W. X. Sudduth, A. Lagorio, J. Workman, Wilmarth, and others. These scientists had raised an exceedingly stable foundation for the doctrine of degeneracy long before Lombroso and Nordau (forcing one phase of the subject into popular recognition) compelled an examination of the entire doctrine.

The work has been written with a special intention of reaching educators and parents. With this object, it has avoided laying stress on any one cause of degeneracy, and ignoring factors which produce it and are aggravated by it. The doctrinaire reformer will here find no support for any limited theory. While it does not pretend in the slightest degree to give all the details of degeneracy, it attempts to lay down general principles for practical purposes in a way that permits their application to the solution of sociologic problems.

From a sense of scientific accuracy no attempts have been made to demarcate, rigidly, abnormality from disease, or atavism from arrested development, except as may be done by the features of the cases in which the terms are used. The guiding principle adopted has been that the factors of degeneracy affect in the ancestor the checks on excessive action acquired during the evolution of the race, thus producing a state of nervous exhaustion. The descendant in consequence is unable to reach the state of the ancestor thus nervously exhausted.

For the illustrations, other than those that are original, the author is indebted to the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dental Cosmos, The International Dental Journal, The St. Louis Clinical Record, to M. Félix Alcan, and to the officers of the New York State Reformatory and Illinois State Reformatory, Drs. Geo. T. Carpenter, W. A. Pusey, F. S. Coolidge, Ch. Féré, Zuckerkandl, John E. Greves, Amsterdam; Ernst Sjoberg, Stockholm; Bastian, J. G. Kiernan, E. C. Spitzka, John Ridlon, James W. Walker, and Ignatius Donnelly.

E. S. T.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

DEGENERACY

CHAPTER I

Introduction

Considered as a condition hurtful to the type, the conception of degeneracy may be said to appear even in the precursors of man, since animals destroy soon after birth offspring which, to them, appear peculiar. With that stage of development of the religious sense marked by assigning malign occult powers to natural objects and forces, this view of degeneracy became systematised, and exposed weakly or deformed offspring, charged to evil powers, to death. This occult conception of degeneracy is even yet a part of American folklore. Against degenerate children charms are still used by the “witch-doctors” among the “Pennsylvania Dutch.” These people are on the level of culture of the early seventeenth century middle class English, if not a little below it. The folklore of these, as embodied in Shakespeare, demonstrates, according to J. G. Kiernan,[1] that ere the seventeenth century the fact that “mental and moral defect expressed itself in physical stigmata was recognised and even the term used.” Thistleton Dyer[2] remarks that it is an old prejudice, not yet extinct, that those who are defective or deformed are marked by nature as prone to mischief. Thus in King Richard III. (i. 3) Margaret calls Richard—

“Thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog!
Thou that wast sealed in thy nativity
The slave of nature and the son of hell!”

She calls him hog in allusion to his cognisance, which was a boar. A popular expression in Shakespeare’s day for a deformed person was “stigmatic.” It denoted any one who had been stigmatised or burnt with iron (an ignominious punishment), and hence was employed to represent a person on whom nature had set a mark of deformity. Thus in the Third Part of Henry VI. (ii. 2) Queen Margaret says—

“But thou art neither like thy sire nor dam;
But like a foul misshapen stigmatic,
Marked by the destinies to be avoided,
As venom toads, or lizards’ dreadful stings.”

Again in the Second Part of Henry VI. (v. 1) young Clifford says to Richard—

“Foul stigmatic, that’s more than thou canst tell.”

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (v. 1) Oberon wards off degeneracy from the issue of the happy lovers by the following charm—

“And the blots of Nature’s hand
Shall not in their issue stand;
Never mole, hare-lip nor scar,
Nor mark prodigious, such as are
Despised in nativity,
Shall upon their children be.”

Constant allusions to this subject occur in old writers, showing how strong was the belief of the early English on this point. King John (iv. 2) calls Hubert, the supposed murderer of Prince Arthur,—

“A fellow by the hand of Nature marked,
Quoted and signed to do a deed of shame.”

Concerning this adaptation of the mind to the deformity of the body Francis Bacon remarks: “Deformed persons are commonly even with Nature, for as Nature hath done ill by them so do they by Nature, being void of natural affection, and so they have their revenge on Nature.”

The quaint old “Anatomist of Melancholy,”[3] Burton, seems but to paraphrase modern curers of degeneracy when, at the end of his chapter on the inheritance of defects, he remarks concerning this fetichistic notion: “So many several ways are we plagued and published for our father’s defaults; in so much that as Fernelius truly saith: ‘It is the greatest part of our felicity to be well born, and it were happy for human kind, if only such parents as are sound of body and mind should be suffered to marry.’ An husbandman will sow none but the best and choicest seed upon his land, he will not rear a bull or an horse, except he be right shapen in all parts, or permit him to cover a mare, except he be well assured of his breed; we make choice of the best rams for our sheep, rear the neatest kine, and keep the best dogs, quanto id diligentius in procreandis liberis observandum! And how careful, then, should we be in begetting of our children! In former times some countries have been so chary in this behalf, so stern, that if a child were crooked or deformed in body or mind, they made him away; so did the Indians of old by the relation of Curtius, and many other well-governed commonwealths according to the discipline of those times. ‘Heretofore in Scotland,’ saith Hect Boethius, ‘if any were visited with the falling sickness, madness, gout, leprosy, or any such dangerous disease which was likely to be propagated from the father to the son, he was instantly gelded; a woman kept from all company of men; and if by chance having some such disease she were found to be with child, she with her brood were buried alive’; and this was done for the common good, lest the whole nation should be injured or corrupted. A severe doom, you will say, and not to be used amongst Christians, yet more to be looked into than it is. For now by our too much facility in this kind, in giving way for all to marry that will, too much liberty and indulgence in tolerating all sorts, there is a vast confusion of hereditary diseases, no family secure, no man almost free, from some grievous infirmity or other, when no choice is had, but still the eldest must marry, as so many stallions of the race; or if rich, be they fools or dizzards, lame or maimed, unable, intemperate, dissolute, exhaust through riot, as he said, they must be wise and able by inheritance. It comes to pass that our generation is corrupt, we have many weak persons both in body and mind, many feral diseases raging among us, crazed families; our fathers bad, and we are like to be worse.”

This conception gradually developed into the widespread myth of a primevally perfect man through the natural operation of that psychological law whereby, as Macaulay remarks, society, constantly moving forward with eager speed, is as constantly looking backward with tender regret. They turn their eyes and see a lake where an hour before they were toiling through sand.

From this view came the belief that man as existing is degenerate. This degeneracy, while popularly charged to occult influences, was early ascribed by scientists to physical causes. Aristotle, as Osborn[4] points out, appears to have recognised degeneration or the gradual decline of structures in form and usefulness, in his analysis of “movement” in connection with development. Degeneration is first met with as a term in an explanation of the origin of species by Buffon in the eighteenth century. The conception itself occurs in a criticism by Sylvius of Vesalius (1514-64), who had asserted that the anatomy of Galen could not have been founded upon the human body, because he had described an intermaxillary bone. This bone, Vesalius observed, is found in the lower animals but not in man. Sylvius (1614-72) defends Galen on the ground that though man had no intermaxillary bone at present this is no proof of its absence in Galen’s time. “It is luxury, it is sensuality, which has gradually deprived man of this bone.” This passage, as Osborn remarks, proves that the idea of degeneration of structures through disuse, as well as the idea of the inheritance of the effect of habit, or the “transmission of acquired characters,” is a very ancient one. Sylvius, while here recognising factors of degeneracy, erred in considering disappearance of the intermaxillary bone, not reappearance, as degeneracy. He failed to recognise, moreover, the law of economy of growth by which one structure is sacrificed for another or for the organism as a whole. This law, indicated by Aristotle, but clearly outlined by Goethe in 1807, and Geoffroy St. Hilaire in 1818, underlies the physiological atrophies and hypertrophies which play such a part in degeneracy.

The Twelve Cæsars of Suetonius (that stud book of imperial degeneracy as it has been styled) stamps the decided impression on its readers that Hippocratian notions of degenerate heredity strongly permeated Roman thought, to revive in those Arabic, Italian, and British (Roger Bacon) thinkers who created the scientific phase of the revival of learning.

In the science of medicine, as developed by Hippocrates,[5] the modern conception of degeneracy is evident. Hippocrates argues against the “sacred” nature of epilepsy, since it is a hereditary disease and hence comes under the operation of physical law. He furthermore points out, as did Aristotle, that epilepsy produced in the ancestor by traumatism and other physical causes may be inherited by the child.

As the degeneration phase of evolution was less antagonistic to the religious theory forced into biblical dogma by the Jesuit Suarez (in opposition to the evolutionary views of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas), being supported by biblical dicta (that when the fathers had eaten sour grapes the children’s teeth were set on edge) and fetichistic folklore, it retained a dominance that the advanced phase lost. From the time of Hippocrates, psychiatry (the science devoted to mental disorders) continued to accumulate data of the origin and transmission of human defects. The impetus given the evolutionary explanation of these data by the seventeenth and eighteenth century biologists (Harvey, Buffon, Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, and others) laid the foundation for the modern doctrine of degeneracy.

Buffon[6] remarks that many species are being perfected or degenerated by the great changes in land and sea, by the favours or disfavours of Nature, by food, by the prolonged influences of climate, contrary or favourable, and are no longer what they formerly were. He regarded temperature, food, and climate as the three great factors in the alteration and degeneration of animals.

Erasmus Darwin[7] considers that all life starts from a living filament having the capability of being excited into action by certain stimuli. This capability is that whereby plants and animals react to their environment, causing changes in them which are transmitted to their offspring. All animals undergo transformations which are in part produced by their own exertions in response to pleasures and pains, and many of these acquired forms or propensities are transmitted to their posterity. Other effects of this excitability (such as constitute hereditary diseases, like scrofula, epilepsy, insanity) have their origin in one or perhaps two generations, as in the progeny of those who drink much vinous spirits. Those hereditary propensities cease again if one or two sober generations succeed, otherwise the family becomes extinct.

Benjamin Rush[8] (greatly influenced by the Erasmus Darwin school) remarks that through hereditary sameness of organisation of the nerves, brain and blood vessels, the predisposition to insanity pervades whole families and renders them liable to this disease from a transient and feeble operation of its causes. Insanity when hereditary is excited by more feeble causes than in persons in whom this predisposition has been acquired. It generally attacks the descendants in those stages of life in which it has appeared in the ancestors. Children born previously to the attack of madness in their parents are less liable to inherit it than those who are born after it. Children born of parents who are in the decline of life are more predisposed to insanity than children born under contrary circumstances. A predisposition to certain diseases, seated in parts contiguous to the seat of insanity, often descends from parents to their children. Thus it occurs in a son whose father or mother has been afflicted only with hysteria or habitual headaches. The reverse likewise takes place. There are families in which insanity has existed where the disease has spared the mind in the posterity, but appeared in great strength and eccentricity of the memory and of the passions, or in great perversion of their moral faculties. Sometimes it passes by all the faculties of the mind, and appears only in the nervous system of persons descended from deranged parents; again, madness occurs in children whose parents were remarkable only for eccentricity of mind. Among the diseases that attack the children of the insane, but did not exist in their ancestors, are consumption and epilepsy.

Similar studies were later published by Pinel, Tissot, Chiarrurgi, Stedman, Parkman, Brigham, Prichard, Esquirol, Jacobi, and other American, English, French, Italian, and German alienists. Based upon the data thus obtained, and upon the general principles thus outlined, then appeared—nearly at the same time as the like epoch-making work (on another phase of evolution), Darwin’s Origin of Species—Morel’s Treatise on Human Degeneracy, wherein the principle of natural selection was shown to involve the recognition of the physical conditions that constitute degeneracy, and, necessarily, to exclude primeval perfection. Morel’s definition of degeneration as a marked departure from the original type tending more or less rapidly to the extinction of it, forms the basis of commonly accepted definitions.

While Morel practically outlined the modern study of degeneracy, his theologic timidity forced an absolute definition of a state which, according to his own admission, was purely relative. After fencing somewhat with the position that there was a primevally perfect man,[9] he admits with Tessier the primeval lowness of man, but also thinks that the fall of man could create new conditions which, in his descendants, from heredity and from causes acting on their health, tended to make them depart from the primitive type. These departures from the primitive type have led to varieties, some of which constitute races capable of transmitting racial characteristics. Other varieties in the races themselves have created the abnormal states which Morel has denominated degeneracies. Each of these degeneracies has its own stamp from the cause that produces it. Their common characteristic is hereditary transmission under graver conditions than normal heredity. With certain exceptional instances of regeneration, the progeny of degenerates presents progressive degradation. This may reach such limits that humanity is preserved by its excess. It is not necessary, however, that the ultimate stage of degradation be reached before sterility occurs. Morel confines degeneracy to a pathologic type, criticising F. Heusinger[10] for applying the term degenerate to domestic animals which “throw back” to the wild or original type. Morel’s admission that causes influencing health produce deviations which, under favouring conditions, become racial types capable of indefinite transmission, saves him from absolute scientific inaccuracy, but renders inconsistent his limitation of degeneracy. It may be convenient to separate diseased states from anomalies, but such separation can only be very relative. From his conservatism and his plentiful data, Morel aroused much less antagonism than did a contemporary, Moreau (de Tours), who bore to him the relation of Darwin to Wallace.[11] While Moreau devotes much attention to the factors of degeneracy and its stigmata (or marks), like Morel, his main point is the expansion of the theory of Aristotle which Dryden epigrammatised into—

“Great wit to madness nearly is allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”

As J. G. Kiernan shows,[12] this doctrine, early in the history of the race, obtained dominance through the evolution of arts, sciences, and religions from fetichism. Phenomena manifested by fetich priests (of the Shaman type) so closely resembled epileptic insanity in its frenzies and visions that the two states were long regarded as identical, whence the term “morbus sacer.” The supernatural influences which, in current belief, underlay epilepsy were, at the outset, malign or benign as they were offended or placated. They became benign, and the insane were under protection of a deity, as in Mussulman countries. Later still the demon-possession theory gained dominance, and at length the demon sank into disease. Throughout all this evolution the belief in an inherent affinity between insanity and genius persisted.

Aristotle, in whose day the disease notion was becoming dominant, asserts that, under the influence of head congestion, persons sometimes become prophets, sybils, and poets. Thus Mark, the Syracusan, was a pretty fair poet during a maniacal attack, but could not compose when sane. Men illustrious in poetry, arts, and statesmanship are often insane, like Ajax, or misanthropic like Bellerophon. Even at a recent period similar dispositions are evident in Plato, Socrates, Empedocles, and many others, above all, the poets.

According to Plato, “Delirium is by no means evil, but when it comes by gift of the gods, a very great benefit. In delirium the sibyls of Delphi and Dodona were of great service to Greece, but when in cold blood were of little or none. Frequently, when the gods afflicted men with epidemics, a sacred delirium inspired some men with a remedy for these. The Muses excite some souls to delirium to glorify heroes with poetry, or to instruct future generations.”

Precedent to the works of Morel and Moreau appeared their source and inspiration, Prosper Lucas’s Natural Heredity.[13] Here the biologic current of thought encountered the sociologic current; although the waves clashed, the two currents merged into and modified each other. The biologist demonstrated that degenerate types often “threw back” in their structures, and this very “throwing back” made them the fittest to survive. The sociologist found that the only test of acquired or inherited degeneracy in man was disaccord with environment. The co-existent moral and physical defects resultant on heredity found by Erasmus Darwin, Rush, Parkman, Grohmann, and others tended to show that all types of defectives might be a product of heredity.

These stimulating researches into the sources of crime led to a controversy which reached its height two decades ere the treatise of Morel. To this controversy three suggestive works owed their origin: a psychological treatise by Dr. Lauvergne[14] on felons, a romance with a purpose by Eugène Sue,[15] and a suggestively practical brochure by a rather corrupt police official, Vidocq.[16] Seemingly conflicting as were these productions, all strikingly illustrated the influence of heredity and environment in the production of defectives. To these productions were soon added those of Moreau (de Tours),[17] Attemyer, Eliza Farnham,[18] the American Sampson,[19] Dally, Lélut, Camper, and the older Voisin.

Morel[20] laid the foundation of what is widely known as the Lombroso School by a brochure wherein he proposed to entitle morbid anthropology, “that part of the science of man the aim of which is to study phenomena due to morbid influences and to malign heredity.”

To the factor of atavism, inconsistently ignored by Morel, the early embryologic studies of Von Baer and the biologic studies resultant on the transmutation of species lent special emphasis. Three possibilities of life await, as Wilson[21] remarks, each living being: either it remains primitive and unchanged, or it progresses toward a higher type, or it backslides and retrogresses. The factors underlying the stable state force the animal to remain as it is; those underlying the progressive tendency make it more elaborate, while the factors of degeneration, on the other hand, tend to simplify its structure. It requires no special thought to perceive that progress is a great fact of nature. The development of every animal and plant shows the possibilities of nature in this direction. But the bearings of physiological backsliding are not so clearly seen.

That certain animals degenerate or retrogress in their development is susceptible of ready and familiar illustration. No better illustration is needed than is derived from the domain of parasitic existence. When an animal or plant attaches itself partly or wholly to another living being, and becomes more or less dependent upon the latter for support and nourishment, it exhibits, as a rule, retrogression and degeneration. The parasitic “guest” dependent on its “host” for lodging alone, or it may be for both board and lodging, is in a fair way to become degraded in structure, and, as a rule, exhibits marked degradation where the association has persisted sufficiently long. Parasitism and servile dependence act very much in structural lower life as analogous instances of mental dependence on others act on man.

The destruction of characteristic individuality and the extinction of personality are natural results of that form of association wherein one form becomes absolutely dependent on another for all the conditions of life. A life of mere attachment exhibits similar results, and organs of movement disappear by the law of disuse. A digestive system is a superfluity to an animal which, like the tapeworm, obtains its food ready made in the very kitchen, so to speak, of its host. Hence the lack of digestive apparatus follows the finding of a free commissariat by the parasite. Organs of sense are not necessary for an attached and rooted animal; these latter, therefore, go by the board and the nervous system itself becomes modified and altered. Degradation wholesale and complete is the penalty the parasite has to pay for its free board and lodging; and in this fashion Nature may be said to revenge the host for the pains and troubles wherewith, like Job of old, he may be tormented.

The most emphatic biologic degeneration is that discovered by Kowalevsky[22] in the sea squirt, which, in its larval state, is a vertebrate, and when adult is an ascidian, seemingly far below the cuttlefish and the worms. This strikingly illustrates that, as Ray Lankester[23] has said, degeneration is a gradual change of structure by which the organism becomes adapted to less varied and less complex conditions of life; a reverse of evolution which proceeds from the indefinite and homogeneous to the definite and heterogeneous with a loss of explosive force due to the acquirement of inhibitions or checks.

This principle of biologic degeneration, long recognised, was most lucidly enforced by Dohrn[24], whose views were later extended by Ray Lankester. The parallelism of animal degeneracy with that of man, so clearly evident even in the parasitic nature of defectives, was, as Meynert[25] showed, due to the fact that the fore-brain is an inhibitory apparatus against the lower and more instinctive natural impulses. The higher its development the greater is the tendency to subordinate the particular to the general. Even in insects a high social growth occurs, as in the bee and ant communities. The same is the case in the development of man; in the infant, a being entirely wrapped in its instincts of self-preservation, the “primary ego” is predominant and the child is an egotistic parasite. As development goes on this standpoint is passed, conscience assumes its priority, the fore-brain acts as a check on the purely vegetative functions and the “secondary ego” takes precedence over the primary one; this is the general order of society, designated as civilisation or social order. If this inhibition become weakened or disordered, predominance of the natural instincts or impulses occurs, and when it is totally lost the individual is in the position of a criminal who opposes the ethical order of society—a parasite, and one of the worst kind who not only lives upon his host but destroys him in doing so.

Hence degenerate tendencies are reversions in type indicating the original source of the inhibition.

The tree of Moreau[26] illustrates clearly the essential principles of these inter-relations of defect, further elucidated by the observations of Sander[27] on the connection of deformed central nervous systems with mental and moral disorder.

NERVOUS HEREDITY.

The extensive studies of Niepce,[28] Vogt,[29] and others on idiot biology sought to show that the brain was not merely arrested in development, but sometimes reverted even as low as the sauropsida type (reptiles and birds). Grohmann,[30] as early as 1820, had “often been impressed in criminals, especially in those of defective development, by the prominent ears, the shape of the cranium, the projecting cheek-bones, the large lower jaws, the deeply placed eyes, the shifty, animal-like gaze.”

Maudsley[31] observes that in the case of such an extreme morbid variety as a congenital idiot we have to do with a defective nervous organisation. Marchand, in the brain of two idiots of European descent, found the convolutions fewer in number, individually less complex, broader and smoother than in the apes. The condition results neither from atrophy nor mere arrest of growth, but consists essentially in an imperfect evolution of the cerebral hemispheres or their parts, dependent on an arrest of development. The proportion of the weight of brain to that of body is extraordinarily diminished. With the brain of the orang type comes a corresponding defect of function. With this animal type of brain in idiocy sometimes appear animal traits and instincts. One class of idiots is justly designated theroid, so brute-like are its members.

The human brain in the course of fœtal development passes through the same stages as other vertebrate brains, and to some extent these transitional stages resemble the permanent forms of their brain. Summing up, as it were, in itself the leading forms of vertebrate type, there is truly a brute brain within the man’s, and when the latter stops short of its characteristic development, it is natural that it should manifest only its most primitive functions.

It must, however, be pointed out that the human brain, even of the idiot or microcephales, never resembles, as a whole, the brain of any anthropoid or lower animal form. Such a position was maintained by Vogt, but has long since been abandoned. The existing anthropoid apes are not the ancestors of man, and have pursued a different development.[32]

Despine’s[33] researches revealed the absence of human checks on the instinctive tendencies in criminals. He, however, started from the doctrine of moral imbecility as elaborated by Rush, Prichard, Brigham, Ray, Galt, and others. Bruce Thomson,[34] testing Despine’s results by primitive races and Scotch criminals, found that defective, abnormal, and anomalous states of the instinctive faculties exist in entire races and in the “moral idiots” that occur in the best races. Criminals form a variety of the human family quite distinct from law-abiding men. A low type of physique indicating a deteriorated character gives a family likeness due to the fact that they form a community which retrogrades from generation to generation. The low physical condition of juvenile criminals in reformatories, &c., becomes at once obvious if they be compared with healthy, active school children. They are puny, sickly, scrofulous, often deformed, with peculiar, unnaturally developed heads, sluggish, stupid, liable to fits, mean in figure, and defective in vital energy, while at the same time they are irritable, violent, and too often quite incorrigible. The adults usually have a singularly stupid and insensate look. The complexion is bad. The outlines of the head are harsh and angular. The boys are ugly in feature, and have, as a rule, repulsive appearances. These diseases of criminals are a proof of their low type and deteriorated condition. Their deaths are mainly due to tubercular diseases and affections of the nervous system. In the greater number crime is hereditary, a tendency which is, in most cases, associated with bodily defect, such as spinal deformities, stammering or other imperfect speech, club-foot, cleft-palate, hare-lip, deformed jaws and teeth, deaf-mutism, congenital blindness, paralysis, epilepsy, and scrofula.

Elisha Harris,[35] of New York, among 233 convicts found 54 to belong to families in which insanity, epilepsy, and other neuroses existed. Eighty-three per cent. belonged to a criminal, pauper, or inebriate stock, and were, therefore, hereditarily or congenitally affected. Nearly 76 per cent. of their number hence proved habitual criminals. According to Harris, crime, pauperism, and insanity revert into each other, so that insanity in the parent produces crime or pauperism in the offspring, or, vice versâ, crime or pauperism in the parent produces disease or insanity in the offspring. Campagne, Broca, G. Wilson, and others about the same time made similar researches.

The American sociologist, Samuel Royce, after a careful study of American and European defective classes,[36] found that observation of the hereditary nature of pauperism which congenitally reverts into insanity, disease or crime, leaves no doubt but that pauperism is one of the worst forms of race deterioration, and that the paralysis of the human will and its energies is but the result of a fearful dissolution in progress.

Extensive researches made by Charles S. Hoyt,[37] of the New York State Board of Charities (1874), into the origin of the defective classes of that state, show that the pauper, hysteric, epileptic, prostitute, criminal, born-blind, deaf-mute, paranoiac, recurrent lunatic and idiot were buds of the same tree of degenerate heredity. E. C. Spitzka,[38] basing his researches on the principles of Morel as expanded and critically applied by Meynert,[39] reached essentially the same results as also did Westphal, Krafft-Ebing, Grille, Kerlin, Axel Key, Magnan, Foville, Bjornstrom, Amadei, Schüle, Nicolson,[40] Tonnini, Tamburini, Verga, Tamassia, Kowalevsky, and it may be said the German Psychiatrical Society (which, by accepting a conception of the distortion of mental faculties otherwise seemingly high, based on brain deformity rather than disease, accepted the degeneracy doctrine of to-day).

For several decades, moreover, the stigmata of degeneracy have appeared in French, German, Austrian, Russian, Italian, and Scandinavian court reports as evidence of hereditary defects.

As often happens in science—

“Thought by thought is piled till some great truth
Is loosened and the nations echo round.”

Wherefore about this period (1870-78) appeared the first volume of the epoch-making work of Cesare Lombroso,[41] who, erroneously credited with being the apostle of the modern doctrine of degeneracy, has admittedly done more to stimulate research than any other investigator. This work exerted an influence at first in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the Scandinavian countries, while on the English-speaking countries, despite the apparently fertile soil prepared for it, its influence was seemingly slight. Under the degradation produced in many American charitable and correctional institutions by corruption, naturally resultant on a civil war, science therein was at a decided discount between 1861 and 1881. A school arose which, defying the individualistic rule of English common law underlying the institutions of the United States, pandered to mob-law and theologic prejudice by denying certain well-ascertained facts in human degeneracy. This school, represented at the Guiteau trial by the experts for the prosecution, denied heredity and that moral defect could result from physical abnormality. This school, however, was by no means representative of American psychiatry or sociology. Rush, Brigham, James MacDonald, Gait, McFarland, W. W. Godding, Ray, C. H. Hughes, Kerlin, Patterson, Wilbur, Fisher, J. H. McBride, C. H. Nichols, C. A. Folsom, Cowles, and others accepted Morel’s principles. Spitzka,[42] long ere the trial, pointed out that criminals displayed the stigmata of Morel, and that the more intellectual types of insanity were based on brain deformity rather than disease.

Benedikt,[43] of Vienna, in 1879 stated that “criminals generally have nothing analogous to monomaniacs. They tend to develop distinct peculiarities of organisation and psychic features, and these peculiarities are the product of their social condition.” J. G. Kiernan,[44] reviewing his work, remarked that any one who had at all examined the question would be convinced that between the true criminal type, the imbecile and the paranoiac (primäre verrückt) the psychological relations and their anatomical bases are intimate and close. Had Benedikt examined the insane and criminals, not for convolutional aberrations alone, but also for heterotopias, &c., he would never have written the sentence just quoted.

W. W. Godding,[45] commenting on the evidence of J. P. Gray,[46] the leader of the American school that denies degeneracy, feelingly remarked that “the disordered mind does not cease to be a unit although the observed manifestations of its insanity may seem to be confined in some cases to the emotion; in others to the affection; and in still others to the intellectual powers. We cannot deny that the old masters were as keen-sighted observers as ourselves. I dislike to hear drunkenness called dipsomania, as I so often do; but I do not therefore say that dipsomania is only drunkenness. It might improve my standing with the legal fraternity if I should pronounce kleptomania only another name for stealing, but my personal observations convince me that the insane have sometimes a disposition to steal, which is a direct result of their disease, and for which they are no more accountable than the puerperal maniac is for her oaths.

“And now, after all these years of careful research, and our asylum reports[47] rendered bulky with long tables prepared with so much care, involving inquiry on the origin of the disease not alone in the direct family line, but in the collateral branches also; just when the medical profession has come to believe that if one fact in medical science be better established than another, it is that insanity is hereditary, and we undertake in the present case to look up hereditary predisposition, and the family disposition likewise, we are met with the withering conundrum, ‘Can a man inherit insanity from his uncle?’ and we are told that there is no such thing as hereditary insanity. Yes, gentlemen, I understand you; the tendency to the disease is inherited. And so in the strict use of language there is no such thing as insane delusion; but we know that language is seldom used with scientific exactness, and no one is at a loss to understand what we mean when we say that Jones is full of insane delusions, insanity being hereditary in his family. Yes, and if Jones should marry an insane woman, the chances are good that Jones’s son will turn out crazy, no matter how carefully he may be brought up under the direction of the most eminent psychist, for that little germ which you call ‘a tendency’—so minute that it will elude your most careful scrutiny with scalpel and microscope—is a fixed fact, and will prove more potent than all theories. Not born there; develops. Ah, how is it that science shows us that syphilis and small-pox and tubercle are born in the offspring, that the infant comes into the world with spina bifida, idiotic, hydrocephalic, acephalic, that the child is blind and mute and misshapen in his mother’s womb, but is never insane? Because, forsooth, we have seen fit to limit insanity to disease of the brain, and disease is not inherited. Is it possible that in all these years it has not been Dr. Gray’s lot as it has been mine to be consulted about those ‘queer’ children of insane parentage, who are perverse from the start? Will he say that the perverseness is only a ‘badness’ which should be whipped out of the child? But that has generally been thoroughly tried before the physician is consulted. Heterodox I know it is, but observed facts compel me to be heterodox with Prichard and Esquirol and Ray, with Morel and Griesinger and Maudsley, and I know not how many others, in recognising in some cases a condition of inherent defect born in the individual, and not a result of education—a condition which writers have recognised under various names as hereditary mental disorder, insane diathesis, insane temperament.”

The Guiteau trial so stimulated studies of degeneracy that two experts for the prosecution, A. McL. Hamilton[48] and H. M. Stearns,[49] later changed their views as to degeneracy, while C. L. Dana, a strong supporter of the Gray school in 1881, subsequently made valuable contributions to the literature of the degeneracy stigmata. The position then taken by Spitzka and Kiernan as to the cerebral basis of degeneracy was in 1882 supported by H. Howard,[50] of Montreal; Workman,[51] of Toronto; Kerlin,[52] of Pennsylvania; Osler,[53] of Baltimore; and C. K. Mills,[54] of Philadelphia.

It was during 1881, moreover, that Jacobi made extensive studies of degeneracy in royalty and aristocracy,[55] as earlier had Ireland.[56]

From the time of Itard degenerate phenomena in idiots had been traced to cerebral mal-development. Kerlin[57] pointed out that “epileptic change” in them was marked by moral alteration similar in explosive characters to that so frequently observed in criminals. In England students of idiocy like Clouston, Shuttleworth, Beach, Ireland, Langdon Down, and others, had early brought the recognition of its inter-relations with insanity, crime and neuroses into strong relief. To the studies of Bruce Thomson, Maudsley, and Nicolson, Tyndall[58] gave strong support from the actual experience of a governor of a great British prison, who found that the prisoners in his charge might be divided into three distinct classes: the first class consisted of persons who ought never to have been in prison; external accident and not internal taint had brought them within the grasp of the law, and what had happened to them might happen to most of us; they were essentially men of sound moral stamina, though wearing the prison garb. Then came the largest class, formed of individuals possessing no strong bias, moral or immoral, plastic to the touch of circumstances which would mould them into either good or evil members of society. Thirdly, came a class, happily not a large one, whom no kindness could conciliate and no discipline tame. They were sent into the world labelled “incorrigible,” wickedness being stamped, as it were, upon their organisation.

With the close of the year 1883 the degeneracy doctrine may be regarded as having practically been accepted in biology, in anthropology, in sociology, in criminology, in psychiatry, and general pathology. Debate was henceforth not as to its existence, but as to its limitations. Precedent to 1835 determinism in popular thought due to Calvinistic predestination had, in English-speaking countries, fought for the doctrine; subsequent thereto the theologic reaction against Calvinism was a strong opposing force, whose influence was finally destroyed by the practically general acceptance of the doctrine of evolution in the late seventies.

CHAPTER II

The Stigmata of Degeneracy

The attempt made by Morel to limit the doctrine of degeneracy to the domain of the morbid proved impossible, because of the rapid accumulation of data by his own school, which demonstrated that atavistic deformity played a larger part in the production of diseases. Bland Sutton does not too forcibly put this result when he states[59] that if it be difficult to define disease when restricted to the human family, it becomes obviously more difficult when disease is investigated on a broad biological basis. As the great barrier which exists between man and those members of his class most closely allied to him consists not in structural characters but in mental power, it necessarily follows that there should be a similarity in the structural alterations induced by diseased conditions in all kinds of animals, allowing of course for the difference in environment. This is known to be the case, and it is clear that as there has been a gradual evolution of complex from simple organisms, it necessarily follows that the principles of evolution ought to apply to diseased conditions if they hold good for the normal or healthy states or organism; in plain words, there has been an evolution of disease pari passu with evolution of animal forms. For a long time it has been customary to talk of physiologic types of diseased tissues; Sutton’s earlier efforts were directed to searching among animals for the purpose of detecting in them the occurrence of tissues, which in man are only found under abnormal conditions. The statement proved to be true in a limited sense. At the same time the truth of an opinion held by nearly all thoughtful physicians, that disease may in many instances be regarded as an exaggerated function, was forcibly illustrated; the manifestations of disease were found to be regulated by the same law which governs physiological processes in general, and many conditions regarded as pathological in one animal were revealed as physiological in another.

The doctrine, therefore, has its scope limited only by biologic data. It of necessity begins with the cell itself in its relation to other cells of that practically compound organism which constitutes a single vertebrate. The cell may, therefore, degenerate as a single member of that organism, producing danger or benefit to the other cells. Thus the cancer cell degenerates in its power of reproduction below the tissue to which it belongs. It is peculiarly true here, as has been said by Herbert Spencer, that every vertebrate is an aggregate whose internal actions are adapted to counterbalance its external actions; hence the preservation of its movable equilibrium depends upon its development and the proper number of these actions; the movable equilibrium may be ruined when one of these actions is too great or too small, and through deficiency or need of some organic or inorganic cause in its surroundings. Every individual can adapt itself to these changeable influences in two ways, either directly or by producing new individuals who will take the place of those whom the equilibrium has destroyed. Therefore there exist forces preservative and destructive of the race. As it is impossible that these two kinds of force should counterbalance each other, it is necessary that the equilibrium should re-establish itself in an orderly way. Since there are two preservative forces of every animal group—the impulse of every individual to self-preservation and the impulse to the production of other individuals—these faculties must vary in an inverse ratio; the former must diminish when the second augments. Degeneration constitutes a process of disintegration, the reverse of integration. Hence, if the term individuation be applied to all the processes which complete and sustain the life of the individual, and that of generation to those which aid the formation and development of new individuals, individuation and generation are necessarily antagonistic.

In the phenomena of unisexual generation we see that the larger organisms never reproduce themselves in the unisexual way, while the smaller organisms reproduce themselves with the greatest rapidity by this method. Between these two extremes unisexual reproduction decreases while the size increases. In the history of all plants and animals is evident the physiologic truth, that while the general growth of the individual proceeds rapidly, the reproductive organs remain imperfectly developed and inactive. On the contrary, the principle of reproduction indicates decrease in the intensity of growth and becomes a cause of cessation.

Great fecundity is always attended by great mortality. Each superior degree of organic evolution is accompanied by an inferior degree of fecundity. The greater the germs the less is the individuation, and vice versâ. The greater and more complex the organisation, the less is the power of multiplication.

What is true of the cells is also true of organs composed of them. Each organ can be regarded as a distinct animal (a parasite is preferable for comparison) which has its own nervous system (the ganglia), but is fed and controlled by the organism as a whole. Degeneration of this organ may therefore be an expression of a local state peculiar to it and either beneficial or maleficent, or both in inverse degree, to the organism as a whole, or it may be the expression of a general defect in the whole organism. The sclerotic states of the appendix vermiformis in man and of the human liver are, as Kiernan has shown, two excellent illustrations of the degeneracies last described. Man, in common with the four anthropoid apes, has a little thin tube attached to the cæcum known as the appendix vermiformis. In the early embryo it is equal in calibre to the other bowels, but ceases to grow proportionately after a certain time. In the new-born child it is almost as large as in the adult. As this tube proved disadvantageous to man’s precursor (as it does to certain mammals) from catching foreign bodies which form the nucleus of enteroliths or bowel stones, it has lost the nutritive supply of the other intestines and is tending to disappear. It is often absent in man. The defect in its structure, while predisposing to the attacks of germs and an expression of its own degeneracy, is an evidence of an advance in evolution in the organism as a whole by which great danger and waste of nutritive force are avoided.

Recent researches[60] have shown that “hob-nail” liver, once supposed to be due entirely to abuse of alcohol, usually occurs in states of congenital deficiency in persons of defective heredity. The change in the appendix which is tending to cause its disappearance is essentially a sclerosis, and hence is morbid, considered from the appendix standpoint alone. As the same process occurs in “hob-nail” liver, it is obvious that degeneracy may be an expression of general advance and local defect or may be a local expression of general defect. The same phenomenon is seen in the nervous system. The researches of Cunningham[61] have shown that in man the struggle for existence between the sympathetic and the cerebro-spinal system has ended in the victory of the latter, while the first is tending to disappear. Such changes must necessarily result in local degeneracies which are for the benefit of the organism as a whole. Degeneracy on this basis may express itself in simple disturbance of the lower or nutritive functions. The uric acid or gouty states, for example, are, as Fothergill long ago pointed out, assumptions by mammalian organs of the functions of those of birds and reptiles. In conditions like myxœdema the skin, through thyroid gland disturbances, takes on features which resemble in result those found in certain mollusks and low fish. These nutritive disturbances may show themselves in disorders of the pituitary body (acromegaly, giantism, &c.), whereby the bony system of man reverts to conditions like those of the gorilla. The same conditions also appear in the diathesis of the “bleeders.” All these conditions, however, may be an expression of a degenerate type assuming a normal equilibrium, as well as of a normal organism taking the first steps in degeneracy.

In a general way, therefore, as Dohrn has pointed out, this principle holds good of man not only as an organic unit but as a compound organism. Degeneracy[62] is a gradual change of structures by which the organism becomes adapted to less varied and less complex conditions of life. The opposite progression process of elaboration is a gradual change of structure in which the organism becomes adapted to more and more varied and complex conditions of existence. In elaboration there is a new expression of form corresponding to new perfection of work in the animal machine. In degeneracy there is suppression of form corresponding to the cessation of work. Elaboration of some one organ may be a necessary accompaniment of degeneracy in all the others. This is very generally the case. Only when the total result of the elaboration of some organs, and the degeneracy of others, is such as to leave the whole mass in a lower condition—that is, fitted to less complex action and reaction in regard to its surroundings than is the type—can the individual be regarded as an instance of degeneracy. These degeneracies appear at varying periods, since struggles for existence on the part of the different organs and systems of the body are most ardent during periods of body evolution and involution. During fœtal life, during the first dentition, during the second dentition (often as late as the thirteenth year), during puberty and adolescence (fourteen to twenty-five), during the climacteric (forty to sixty), when uterine involution occurs in woman and prostatic involution in man, and finally during senility (sixty and upwards), during all these periods degeneracy may be shown by mental or physical defect, a congenital tendency to which has remained latent until the period of stress. These defects may be such biochemic alterations (undemonstrable by existing methods) as lead to diminished inhibitory power or other altered function, or to secondary pathologic or teratologic change of decidedly demonstrable nature. Organs and structures checked at a certain phase of development may pursue a course of development differing from that pointed out in man but outlined in other vertebrates. The human cyclopean monstrosities, for example, might be regarded as reversions to the single-eyed sea-squirts, who are possibly the Ascidian precursors of the vertebrates.

The scope of degeneracy may therefore be limited to certain signs which are its sole expressions. These signs (stigmata as they were early called) may be the only expression of degeneracy, and their significance must be determined by a careful examination of the organism in which these expressions are found, since they may be merely defects produced by degeneracy, or may indicate how deep such degeneracy has penetrated. They may, therefore, indicate either slight or serious defect. In proportion to the depth of degeneracy in the organism will the stigmata affect the earlier simpler or later complicated acquisitions through evolution. Of necessity, when the organism is affected by degeneracy, the morbid element will take the line of least resistance, determined by the depth of degeneracy as well as the variability of the structures concerned. The same influence must equally affect functions of the structures. Furthermore, expressions of degeneracy will, as already stated, be influenced by the periods of stress; the first and second dentition, puberty, the climacteric and the senile period. In a general way these stigmata are divisible into mental and physical, and are best observable in their relations to the periods of stress. In certain races, as in certain animals, conditions appearing before puberty was completed cannot be considered as settling the position of the animal in evolution. What is true of individuals is also true of classes. The anthropoid apes and the negroes are much higher in physical characteristics, with potential mental results, before puberty than after. The infant ape, as Havelock Ellis[63] points out, is very much nearer to man than the adult ape. “The infant ape is higher in the line of evolution than the adult, and the female ape, by approximating to the infant type, is somewhat higher than the male. Man, in carrying on the line of evolution, started not from some adult male simian, but from the infant ape and, in a less degree, from the female ape. The human infant bears precisely the same relation to his species as the simian infant bears to his, and we are bound to conclude that his relation to the future evolution of the race is similar. The human infant presents, in an exaggerated form, the chief distinctive characteristics of humanity—the large head and brain, the small face, the hairlessness, the delicate bony system. By some strange confusion of thought we usually ignore this fact, and assume that the adult form is more highly developed than the infantile form. From the point of view of adaptation to the environment, it is undoubtedly true that the coarse, hairy, large-boned and small-brained gorilla is better fitted to make his way in the world than his delicate offspring; but from a zoological point of view we witness anything but progress. In man, from about the third year onwards, further growth—though an absolutely necessary adaptation to the environment—is to some extent growth in degeneration and senility. It is not carried to so low a degree as in the apes, although by it man is to some extent brought nearer to the apes, and among the higher human races the progress towards senility is less marked than among the lower human races. The child of many African races is scarcely, if at all, less intelligent than the European child, but while the African as he grows up becomes stupid and obtuse, and his whole social life falls into a state of hide-bound routine, the European retains much of his childlike vivacity. And if we turn to what we are accustomed to regard as the highest human types, as represented in men of genius, we shall find a striking approximation to the child type.” The face, in its contest for existence with the brain, has finally caused both the cranium and the jaws to assume (for defence and food purposes) a lower type, although as regards existing functions and the higher standpoint of environment the infantile type must be considered the higher. Still a casual glance at the Ascidian tadpole shows that deficient as is the development of the ganglia afterward forming the medulla, the face is still more deficient. The face, as Minot shows,[64] is a characteristic of the higher vertebrates, and acquires increased importance with rise in the evolution. The position of the face in embryonic development is originally determined by the head-bend. If a median, longitudinal section of the head be imagined to occupy a rectangular area divided into quarters, then the lower posterior quarter corresponds to the mouth region, the other three-quarters to the brain. As development progresses, the mouth quarter so disproportionately enlarges in relation to the rest of the head as to project forward in front of the fore-brain. In this stage, which is represented by the adult amphibians, the bulk of the facial apparatus is very great, proportionately to the cranium. In the reptiles the mouth region is elongated still further in front of the brain-case, resulting in the long snout. In mammals a third stage is established by the great increase in size of the brain, especially of the cerebral hemispheres. In consequence the brain comes to extend over the snout, as it were; in man, whose brain has the maximum enlargement, the facial apparatus is almost entirely covered by the brain. In the course of evolution the face, while serviceable to the animal for certain reasons of general constitutional character (food-getting, means of defence and means of obtaining mates), is less so than brain growth. A struggle for existence, therefore, inevitably results between the tendency of the face to appropriate power of growth and the like tendency of the brain, which, in defective organisms, produces marked reversions of the one for the benefit of the other. This struggle is further complicated by the embryonic relations to both of the hypophysis, since this body admittedly exerts an influence over bone growth, most markedly (but abnormally) exhibited in acromegaly (excessive bone growth). In this contest for existence in the degenerate types, degeneracy will, of necessity, take the direction of least resistance. As the brain is the last acquirement in vertebrates, considered from the standpoint of necessity, while the face (also a late acquirement) is much less complex, the last, obviously, will present the derangements from degeneration in shape, while the former will show these in shape and function. Furthermore, during the embryonic period the development of the brain will, of necessity, be more immediately affected by degeneracy than the face, which will gain in evolution at its expense. The stigmata of degeneracy, therefore, most likely to attract attention are in the order given, those of the face, jaws, and teeth; ear, eye, cranium; body, bodily functions; brain and spinal cord. Under these last are to be included their mental and nervous functions.

The following table summarizes in practical form these stigmata[65]:—

The factors producing degeneration act by causing nervous exhaustion in the first generation. This implies a practical degeneration in function since tone is lost.

Every nerve cell has two functions, one connected with sensation or motion, and the other with growth. If the cell be tired by excessive work along the line of sensation or motion the function as regards growth becomes later impaired, and it not only ceases to continue in strength, but becomes self-poisoned. Each of the organs (heart, liver, kidneys, &c.) has its own system of nerves (the sympathetic ganglia), which while under control by the spinal cord and brain act independently. If these nerves become tired the organ fails to perform its function, the general system becomes both poisoned and ill-fed, and nervous exhaustion results. In most cases, however, the brain and spinal cord are first exhausted. The nerves of the organs are thus allowed too free play, and exhaust themselves later. This systemic exhaustion has local expression in the testicles in the male, in the womb and ovaries in the female. Through this the body is imperfectly supplied with natural tonics (antitoxins) formed by the structures, and the general nervous exhaustion becomes still more complete. All the organs of the body are weakened in their function. Practically the neurasthenic in regard to his organs has taken on a degenerative function albeit not degenerating in structure, since the restlessness of the organs is a return to the undue expenditure of force which occurs in the lower animals in proportion as it is unchecked by a central nervous system. Through the influence of various exhausting agencies the spinal cord and the brain lose the gains of evolution and the neurasthenic is no longer adjusted to environment. Since the reproductive organs suffer particularly, children born after the acquirement of nervous exhaustion, more or less checked in development as the influence of atavism is healthy or not, repeat degenerations in the structure of their organs, which in the parent were represented by neurasthenic disorders in function. As the ovaries of the neurasthenic women generally exhibit prominently the effects of the nervous exhaustion, the offspring of these do not retain enough vigour to pass through the normal process of development.

CHAPTER III

Heredity and Atavism

Heredity, like other biologic factors, starts with the cell. As elsewhere pointed out, reproduction is first unicellular in type and involves an expenditure of nutritive force antagonistic to the growth of the cell. As Geddes remarks,[66] no one can dispute that the nutritive, vegetative, or self-regarding processes within the plant or animal are as opposed to the reproductive, multiplying, species-regarding processes, as income to expenditure or as building up to breaking down. But within the ordinary nutritive or vegetative functions of the body there is necessarily a continuous antithesis between two tissue-changing sets of processes, constructive and destructive metabolism. The contrast between these two processes is seen throughout nature, whether in the alternating phases of cell-life or in the great antithesis of growth and reproduction.

The starfish, deprived of an arm, replaces this by a fresh growth; crabs can renew the great claws which they have lost in fighting; even as high up as the lizard the loss of a leg or a tail can be made good. In a great variety of cases a kind of physiological forgiveness is shown in the reparation of even serious injuries. Now this “regeneration,” as it is called, is a process of reproduction. By continuous growth the cells of a persistent stump are able to reproduce the entire number. A sponge, a hydra or a sea-anemone may be cut into pieces with the result that each fragment grows into a new organism. The same is done with many plants; and though the division is artificial the result shows how very far from unique is the process spoken of as reproduction, which is but more or less discontinuous growth. This is well shown in the evolution onward insensibly from cases of continuous budding, as in sponge or rosebush, to discontinuous budding in hydra zoophyte and tiger-lily, where the offspring vegetatively produced are sooner or later set free.

The enormous expenditure of force required for unicellular reproduction is lessened by conjugation with another cell through satisfaction of cell hunger; and this, by making two cells do the work of one, lessens the amount of nutritive force expended by each. Evolution in fertilisation has the following steps:—

As Maupas has shown, by the time conjugation of two similar cells is reached, the paranucleus in both is incipiently hermaphroditic. The impelling force leading to conjugation is, as Rolph has shown, cell hunger. Conjugation, he remarks, is a necessity for satisfaction, a gnawing hunger which drives the animal to engulf its neighbour, to isophagy (self-eating). The process of conjugation is only a special form of nutrition which occurs because of a reduction of the nutritive income or an increase of the nutritive needs. It is an “isophagy” which occurs in place of “heterophagy” (eating of others). “The less nutritive, and therefore smaller, hungrier, and more mobile organism is the male, the more nutritive and usually relatively more quiescent organism the female. Therefore, too, is it that the small starving male seeks out the large, well-nourished female for purpose of conjugation, to which the latter, the larger and better nourished, is on its own motive less inclined.” The unicellular type of reproduction long remains after sex differentiation has occurred and assumes the form of parthenogenesis (virgin generation). The phenomena of this demonstrate that the female element is the highest in evolution. Spitzka[67] has shown that the ovum possesses an inherent activity independently of fructification. How far this may extend in the direction of more mature development is shown by what is known about parthenogenesis. This is the development of living beings without a father. Bees, some butterflies, ants and wasps notoriously multiply their kind without sexual congress. As a rule the parthenogenetic offspring are themselves incapable of further procreating their kind. But to this there are remarkable exceptions. The aphides multiply for many generations without the intervention of a male. Weigenbergh has shown that the silk-moth can be propagated as long as the male element is permitted to act at every fourth generation. The Artemsia salina, a minute crustacean living in saline springs, reproduces its kind for years without a male being present, males being produced at definite intervals only (Von Siebold). Among the vertebrata parthenogenetic development has also been observed, though rarely reaching maturity. Thus, segmentation occurs in unfertilised ova of the chicken (Oellacher), of the fish (Burnett and Agassiz), and of frogs (Moquia-Tanden). Spitzka has seen a blastoderm form in unfertilised ova of the toad-fish (Batrachus tau). Hensen isolated the oviducts of a rabbit, thus rendering the admission of semen impossible, while the ova, discharged at heat, were compelled to remain in these oviducts. Three years later he killed the animal and found the ova had developed into twisted, club-shaped, hollow sacs. The development in the female ovary (also, though very rarely, in the male testicle and parotid gland, which show such a remarkable metastatic sympathy in mumps), of dermoid cysts (containing bones recognisable as maxillaries with teeth, hair, and skin, rudimentary bowel, gland, and brain traces), even in undoubted virgins, proves that even the human ovum is capable of parthenogenetic development. While such development, so far as known to science, is always abortive, and while, as Washington Irving remarks, the ingenious maiden who to-day would attribute conception to any other cause than sexual congress would find it difficult to overcome the prejudice of scientists, yet embryology, while declaring immaculate generation improbable, does not pronounce it impossible. A worker bee may be an offspring of an unimpregnated queen bee. What is a regular occurrence in one class of animals is sometimes observed as an exceptional one in another class. If the startling and apparently miraculous nature of a virgin generation of a living child be regarded as the sole objection to receiving such a fact, its defender might urge that the virgin generation of a dermoid cyst with all the traces, however aborted, of vertebrate organisation, is only a shade less startling and miraculous.

This power of parthenogenesis, however, cannot continue indefinitely without extinction. This has been shown by the careful experiments of Maupas, who had observed 215 generations of an infusorian without sexual union. He found that then the family became extinct. Powers of nutrition, division, and conjugation with unrelated forms come to a standstill. The first symptom of this senile degeneration is decrease in size, which may go on till the individuals only measure a quarter of their normal proportions. Various internal structures then follow suit “until at last formless abortions occur, incapable of living and reproducing themselves.” The nuclear changes are no less momentous. The important paranucleus is fatally sterile. The larger nucleus may also become affected, “the chromatin gradually disappears altogether.” Physiologically, too, the organisms become manifestly weaker, though there is excessive sexual excitation. Such senile decay of the individuals and of the isolated family inevitably ends in death. Sexual union in those infusorians, dangerous perhaps for the individual life, a loss of time so far as immediate multiplication is concerned, is, in a new sense, necessary for the species. The life runs in cycles of a sexual division which are strictly limited. Conjugation with unrelated forms must occur else the whole life ebbs. Without it the protozoa, which some have called “immortal,” die a natural death. Conjugation is the necessary condition of their eternal youth and immortality.

Starting from this standpoint the relative functions of the two sexes in heredity are apparent. The original function of reproduction, that of cell division, is the part of the female. The male in the lower instances simply supplies the female with nutriment. Thus in certain plants there is nothing but a subtle osmosis between the sexes. This is also the case with some of the lower infusoria. With a rise in evolution protoplasm becomes differentiated. At the outset of the subject of heredity it is evident, therefore, that the female furnishes the type which is best capable of development when properly nourished by a highly developed male. To deficiencies in both particulars are due defects and variations in the offspring. As the product of fructification is longest under the nutritive control of the female, her influence is most emphatic in either redeeming defects or producing them. Heredity, according to Ribot, Spitzka, Féré, and others, is divisible into direct heredity, indirect heredity, and, more dubiously, telegony. Direct heredity consists in the transmission of paternal and maternal qualities to the children. This form of heredity has two aspects: (1) The child takes after father and mother equally as regards both physical and moral characters, a case strictly speaking of very rare occurrence; or (2) the child, while taking after both parents, more especially resembles one of them. Here again distinction must be made between two cases. The first of these is when the heredity takes place in the same sex from father to son, from mother to daughter. The other which occurs more frequently, is where heredity occurs between different sexes—from father to daughter or from mother to son. Reversional heredity or atavism consists in the reproduction in the descendants of the moral or physical qualities of their ancestors. It occurs frequently between grandfather and grandson, as well as between grandmother and granddaughter. Collateral or indirect heredity, which is of rarer occurrence than the foregoing, and is simply a form of atavism, subsists, as indicated by the name, between individuals and their ancestors in the indirect line—uncle, or grand-uncle and nephew, aunt and niece. Finally (3) there is telegony, or the heredity of influence, very rare from the physiological point of view, which consists in reproduction in the children by a second marriage of some peculiarity belonging to a former spouse.

In dealing with heredity the position of Weismann and others, that acquired characters cannot be inherited, needs a short examination. In his later work Weismann has practically abandoned the essential basis of his position by admitting that maternal nutrition may play a part in determining variation. He[68] now asserts that the origin of a variation is equally independent of selection and amphimixis, and is due to the constant occurrence of slight inequalities of nutrition in the germ plasm. As acquired characters affecting the constitution of the parents are certain to affect the nutrition of the germ plasm, it is therefore obvious, according to Weismann’s admission, that acquired characters or their consequences will be inherited. This is an emphatic though concealed abandonment of the central position of Weismann.

One of the stock arguments of the Weismann school is drawn from results of the Jewish rite of circumcision. While the operation is not calculated to make a profound impression on the constitution, and furthermore, as being performed on the male, less likely to affect the race, still the alleged non-inheritance of its results is much over-estimated. William Wolf,[69] of Baltimore, Maryland, who has circumcised six hundred Jewish children, finds on careful examination, that 2 per cent. were born partially circumcised and 6 per cent. were born with a short prepuce. P. C. Remondino,[70] of Los Angeles, California, has seen a large number of cases of absence of the prepuce which proved to be hereditary. After a confinement his attention was once called to the child by the nurse, who thought it was deformed. The nurse was astonished at the size and appearance of the glans penis. On examination the prepuce was found to be completely absent. On inquiry, the father and another son, born more than twenty years previously (comprising every male member of the family), were found to have been born with the glands fully exposed. He has seen a French family similarly affected.

Similar, but much stronger, results have been obtained by me through the courtesy of the Reverend Drs. S. Bauer, M. A. Cohen, and B. Gordon, all of Chicago. Dr. Bauer, who has been seventeen years in the practice of the religious rite of circumcision, has circumcised 3,400 boys and has found preputial absence in about 3½ per cent. of the cases. Dr. Cohen, who has been two decades in the practice, has performed 10,000 circumcisions. He has found the prepuce wanting in 500 cases; partially developed in 300 cases; slightly developed in 2,000 cases. Dr. Gordon has performed 4,400 circumcisions in twenty-five years. He has found the prepuce absent in 15 cases; partly wanting in 200, and slightly developed in 2,200 cases. These, it should be remembered, are only cases where preputial change forced itself on the observer, who was not pursuing investigations on this point.

The volume of Hebrew casuistic religious literature collected in the Medrash, evidences as I have elsewhere[71] shown the frequency of congenital preputial defect.

That acquired characters can be transmitted has been definitely shown by the experiments of George Roe Lockwood,[72] of New York, anent hereditary transmission of mutilations. White mice were selected, as they begin to breed when thirty days old, and breed every thirty days. He bred in-and-in for thirty-six generations, destroying the weakly, and thus obtained finer animals than the first pair. He selected a pair, caged them by themselves, and clipped the tails of the young. When they were old enough to breed, he selected a pair and clipped the tails of their progeny. In the seventh generation he obtained some tailless mice, and finally a tailless breed. The experiments have one possible element of error; white mice, like all albinoes, are a degenerate type. At the same time these experiments show that accidental mutilations favoured by circumstances are inherited.

Eimer[73] reports the case of a pair of long-tailed pointers which had once produced a litter of long-tailed pups. In order to obtain short-tailed pups the owner had the tails of both shortened. The bitch from that time produced repeatedly short-tailed pups only. As the most careful attention was paid to the parents, no error can be suspected in this case, which, moreover, excites no surprise among dog-breeders.

Brown-Séquard[74] has shown that a peculiar alteration of the shape of the ear or a partial closing of the eyelids is inherited by the offspring of animals in which these changes were caused by dividing the sympathetic. Exophthalmia (eye protrusion) was inherited by guinea-pigs in whose parents this protrusion of the eyes had occurred after an injury to the spinal cord, and so were bruises and dry gangrene, as well as other trophic disturbances in the ear, due in the parents to an injury to the restiform body of the brain. Loss of certain phalanges or of whole toes of the hind feet which had occurred in the parents in consequence of division of the sciatic nerve was inherited. Diseased conditions of the sciatic nerve occurred in the offspring of guinea-pigs in which this nerve was divided. Forty guinea-pigs in which one or both eyes showed more or less morbid change were descended from three individuals in which one eye had become diseased in consequence of transverse section of the restiform body. Twenty guinea-pigs exhibited muscular atrophy on the upper and lower sides of the thigh, when in the parents such atrophy had been caused by section of the sciatic nerve.

The experiments of Brown-Séquard, Westphal, Dupuy[75] and Obersteiner, which show that artificially induced epilepsy is inherited, still further bear out the conclusions resultant on the inheritance of these mutilations. Indeed, Weismann has been forced to that reductio ad absurdum in science, narrowly limited definitions, in order to maintain his position. “But although I hold it improbable,” he remarks, “that individual variability can depend on a direct action of external influences upon the germ cells and their contained germ plasm, because, as follows from sundry facts, the molecular structure of the germ plasm must be very difficult to change, yet it is by no means to be implied that this structure may not possibly be altered by influences of the same kind continuing for a very long time. This much may be maintained: that influences which are mostly of variable nature, tending now in one direction, now in another, can hardly produce a change in the structure of the germ plasm, and this is the reason why the cause of inheritable individual differences must be sought elsewhere than in these varying influences.” “No one has doubted,” he says, in reply to objections made by Virchow, “that there are a number of congenital deformities, birth-marks, and other individual peculiarities which are inherited. But these are acquired characters in the above sense. True, they must once have appeared for the first time, but we cannot say exactly from what causes; we only know that at least a great proportion of them proceed from the germ itself, and must therefore be due to alterations of the germinal substance. If Virchow could show that any single one of these hereditary deformities had its origin in the action of some external cause upon the already formed body (soma) of the individual and not upon the germ cell, then the inheritance of acquired characters would be proved. But this no one has yet succeeded in proving, often as it has been maintained.”

The crucial test which Weismann demands is furnished by Dupuy,[76] who made one thousand experiments on guinea-pigs to the fifth generation, critically rejecting all results which did not correspond to the most rigid tests of direct heredity, excluding all instances of indirect heredity, however demonstrable. He found that certain lesions of the spinal cord, or the brain or the sciatic nerve, give rise in guinea-pigs to epilepsy.

In from three to six weeks after the operation an alteration in the nutrition takes place in an area of skin which is limited by a line starting from the outer canthus of the eye, and running to the median line on the upper lip, enclosing the nostril, thence backward enclosing the lower jaw, to the anterior portion of the shoulder to the median dorsal line, to the base of the ear and inner canthus of the eye. The alteration in nutrition occurs on the side corresponding to the injury. The pain, heat and cold sense disappear by degrees, while touch appears to be exalted. Very soon, tickling this zone of skin gives rise to twitchings limited to the muscles of the eye and the eyelids on the same side. Later, the muscles of the mouth and of the face are affected, still later the contractions become more general, until the whole side is the seat of convulsions, then the convulsions attack the other side also. When things have come to this point the convulsions precede by a very short time complete loss of consciousness. If the subject of experiment be white, it is found that there is paleness of the face, but in all cases there is little foam at the mouth and dilatation of the pupils. The animal sometimes utters a cry corresponding to the epileptic cry in the man. Not only are the convulsions identical with those in epileptic man, but there is also loss of consciousness, a state of torpor, stupor, and even sometimes insanity. When epilepsy is due to the destruction of the sciatic nerve, the foot of the affected side loses the two outer toes, so that the animal has only one toe, the inner. When young are born to such a parent or parents (for it matters not whether one or both of the parents have been operated upon), they have very often only one toe on the posterior foot. Sometimes, however, they have additional toes, which, in this case, are attached by a pedicle to the limb.

Those peculiarities observed in the parents are in all their details witnessed in the guinea-pigs hereditarily born toeless, who have developed epileptic phenomena. In Dupuy’s cases not only is the epileptic tendency (of which Weismann gives a wholly imaginative microbic explanation) inherited, but the very stigmata (loss of toes) which mark development of the parental epilepsy.

E. D. Cope’s[77] careful studies of the effects of impacts and strains on the feet of mammals are testimony difficult for Weismann to explain, since they also meet his requirements.

Weismann’s admission of the inheritance of a tuberculous habit must logically, from the standpoint of degeneracy, be regarded as destroying his claims.

Kiernan has observed the case of a female cat in which brain mutilation had been induced to secure secondary cerebro-spinal degenerations. The mutilations were made under antiseptic precautions. The descendants of this cat had traces of the mutilation, and its results until the fourth generation, when the breed became extinct. This instance certainly fulfils all Weismann requirements.

In the Lambert family a skin deformity, the last result of degeneracy in previous generations, was transmitted. This peculiarity appeared first, according to Proctor,[78] in the person of Edward Lambert, whose whole body, except his face, the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet, was covered with a horny excrescence. He was the father of six children, all of whom as soon as they had reached the age of six weeks presented the same peculiarity. The only one of them who lived transmitted the peculiarity to all his sons. For five generations all the male members of the family were distinguished by the horny excrescence which had adorned the body of Edward Lambert.

Shwe-Maong, one of the hairless Burmese, when thirty years old had his whole body covered with silky hairs, which attained a length of nearly five inches on the shoulders and spine. He had four daughters, but only one of them resembled him. She had a son who was hairy like his grandfather. The case of this family illustrates rather curiously the relation between the hair and teeth; for Shwe-Maong retained his milk teeth till he was twenty (when he attained puberty); then they were replaced by nine teeth only, five in the upper and four in the lower jaw. Eight of these were incisors, the ninth (in the upper jaw) being a cuspid tooth.

Certain motor expressions of disturbed functions are also inherited. Galton describes the case of a man who, when he lay fast asleep on his back in bed, had the curious trick of raising his right arm slowly in front of his face, up to his forehead, and then dropping it with a jerk, so that the wrist fell heavily on the bridge of his nose. The trick did not occur every night, but occasionally, and was independent of any ascertained cause. Sometimes it was repeated incessantly for an hour or more. The gentleman’s nose was prominent and its bridge often became sore from blows which it received. At one time an awkward sore was produced that was long in healing on account of the recurrence, night after night, of the blows which first caused it. His wife had to remove the buttons from the wrist of his nightgown, as it made severe scratches, and some means were attempted of tying his arm. Many years after his death his son married a lady who had never heard of the family incident. She, however, observed precisely the same peculiarity in her husband; but his nose, from not being particularly prominent, has never as yet suffered from the blows. The trick does not occur when he is half asleep, as, for example, when he is dozing in his armchair, but the moment he is fast asleep he is apt to begin. It, as with his father, is intermittent, sometimes ceasing for many nights, and sometimes almost incessant during a part of every night. It is performed, as it was with his father, with his right hand. One of his children, a girl, has inherited the same trick. She performs it likewise with the right hand but in a slightly modified form; for after raising the arm she does not allow the wrist to drop upon the bridge of the nose, but the palm of her half-closed hand falls over and down the nose, striking it rather rapidly, a decided improvement on the father’s and grandfather’s method. The trick is intermittent in the girl’s case also, sometimes not occurring for periods of several months, but sometimes almost incessantly. These “tricks” suggest nocturnal epilepsy, however.

The face of a child is often fully developed, yet, owing to some of the constitutional diseases, arrested development of the face at this point takes place. The second generation inherits this deformity, while the grandparents possess normally developed faces.

The following case came under my own immediate observation. The grandfather was in the habit of sitting in front of the fire with fingers locked together twirling the thumbs in one direction, and then occasionally knocking the thumb nails together. Two of his three sons inherited this habit; the third brother had the habit of biting his nails when in a fit of abstraction. The nephew of the last has a similar habit under the like conditions. The children of this nephew have in two instances shown a tendency to pick at the nails when in an unconscious state, from acute disease. The third child has a periodical tendency to do the same since it was four months old.

V. P. Gibney,[79] of New York, has reported a family consisting of father and mother, five children, and one grandchild. The father and mother are semi-ambidextrous. All of the children and the grandchild are semi-ambidextrous to an annoying degree; all of the movements which they perform with one hand are simultaneously performed by the other hand. The girls are obliged to use only one hand when dressing themselves, or when cutting patterns, and hold the other hand down by their side, because the two hands perform the same movements at the same time and would interfere with each other.

One factor in heredity concerning which there has been much dispute, and whose existence has been denied because of certain theories anent the nerve connection of the mother and fœtus, is that of maternal impressions. As Féré[80] has shown, the fœtus exhibits very decided reaction to sensory impressions on the mother. He cites cases of several women who, often in the midst of an ordinary dream, producing but very moderate excitation, not generally interrupting sleep, were awakened by fœtal movements. The dreams had nothing of the nightmare which would cause sudden contraction under the influence of a terrifying idea. They were merely the ordinary phenomena of sleep. Mental changes of the mother hence excite motor reactions in the fœtus, and, as with sensorial excitations, these reactions are stronger in the fœtus than in the mother. The mechanism of these motor reactions is, Féré points out, obviously due to unconscious and involuntary movement of the muscle walls of the womb. The organisation of a morbid predisposition may be largely influenced by an accident accompanying conception or gestation. In some degenerates cannot be found a trace of hereditary defect. The fact cited explains how sensorial excitations or repeated and violent emotions in the mother during pregnancy give rise to profound nutritive troubles in the fœtus, and especially in its nervous system. These congenitally degenerated beings (ab utero) can hardly be distinguished from those having direct heredity. A considerable number of cases of epilepsy, idiocy, &c., are recognised as having arisen from alcoholism in the mother. Psychic troubles in the mother may react upon the fœtus in an analogous way. The prominent facts which show the influence of the psychic state of the mother upon the somatic condition of the fœtus explain the action of the imagination of the mother upon the development of the product of conception. The opinion which refers the origin of birth-marks to intense mental impressions on the part of the mother is not without physiological foundation. Concurrently with the motor phenomena, stigmata[81] may become developed by vascular and nutritive troubles produced under the influence of a strong excitation or by the imagination.

Spitzka,[82] who approached maternal impressions from an actively sceptical standpoint, had his scepticism shaken by specimens (preserved in the British Museum) of newly hatched chicks, all of which had a curved beak like a parrot, and the toes set back as in that bird. According to the report of the curator the hens in the farmyard where these monstrosities were hatched had been frightened by a parrot which, having escaped, fluttered among them some time before the eggs were laid and greatly frightened those from whom the malformed chicks were received. It is certain that the chief argument of those who deny that maternal impressions are transmitted is defeated by this case. They have usually asserted that the explanation of the nature and cause of a birth-mark was always an after-thought on the part of the mother. But there was no after-thought in this case. The hens did not publish a theory as to the malformation of their chicks. It was their owner, a gentleman of intelligence and culture, who observed the casual occurrence, and who verified the almost photographic truthfulness of the germ monstrosity by depositing it in a museum as a permanent record at which none may cavil.

Since then, the singular freaks attributable to maternal impressions of women, seen by Spitzka, have become so numerous that he has been compelled to negative the argument that they were merely accidental coincidences. He has never seen an idiotic, malformed child or one afflicted with morbid impulses derived from healthy parents free from hereditary taint in which a maternal impression could not be traced.

In a large number a direct correspondence between the maternal impression and the nature of the deformity or peculiarity could be discovered. He reports the case of a woman, about five months pregnant, who, while standing in her yard, saw her husband stab into the belly of a goat he had slaughtered. The sight of the suddenly protruding visceral mass, which happened to be imperfectly bilobar, shocked her extremely, and, starting back, she, in her great revulsion, feeling a strange sensation at the nape of the neck or back of the head, clutched the former with her right hand. The impression continued to haunt her. When the child was born and she saw its deformity she instantly exclaimed, “Oh, the intestines of that goat!” At the back of its head the child had a large tumour of the consistency of a loose sac of a bluish colour, showing convolutions interpreted by the mother as a reproduction of the intestinal convolutions that had so shocked her. In reality they were the convolutions of a hernia containing the posterior ends of both cerebral hemispheres. The accidental resemblance of the deformity to the mental impressions was striking.

A. Lagorio[83] brought before the Chicago Medical Society several cases in which maternal impressions had produced decidedly abnormal births with deformities resembling those feared by the mother. Kiernan, in discussing these, pointed out that all were instances of checked development. He was of opinion that moral shock, generally directed, played the chief part in maternal impressions through checking development and causing either general or local reversion. Here, as Spitzka[84] shows, the statistical method can be applied. It has been long known that profound grief, mental or physical shock acting on the mother, produce cerebral defect or generally arrested development in the offspring. Of 92 children born in Paris during the great siege, 1870-71, 64 had mental or physical anomalies and the remaining 28 were weakly, 21 were intellectually defective (imbecile or idiotic), and 8 showed moral or emotional insanity. These figures, furnished by Legrand du Saulle, justify the popular designation by the working men of Paris of the defective children born in 1871 as “enfants du siège.”

After the great Chicago fire in 1871 birth-marks, deformities, and mental defects were noticed to occur among the offspring whose mothers were pregnant with them pending the exciting time during and after the conflagration.

Spitzka has seen in practice, constitutionally melancholic or mentally defective children in whom no other predisposing cause could be discovered than that the mother was struggling with direct or indirect results of the financial crisis of 1873. In several of these cases the death of the father was a contributory cause of maternal depression. In Berlin the financial crisis of 1875-80 was followed by an increase in the number of idiots born. Lombroso attributes a series of cases of microcephaly to profound mental impressions occurring during pregnancy. To the same class of cases belong the hermaphrodites born by mothers who have been frightened in their first pregnancy and who continue to bear hermaphrodites. The continual and not ill-founded dread that the succeeding children may resemble the first is to be regarded as a contributory cause. Observers who have had a large experience with illegitimate births believe that the mental agony suffered by the unfortunate mother reacts upon the fœtus, causing arrest of development, and thus accounting for the frequent occurrence of idiocy in illegitimate children.

The influence of maternal diet on the fœtus is excellently illustrated in the results of the “fruit diet” advised by certain vegetarians. Here the children[85] become, as Elise Berwig has recently shown, rickety, irritable, peevish, liable to convulsions, morally peculiar, and otherwise defective in contrast with children born of the same parents without “fruit diet” during pregnancy.

Kiernan,[86] after citing instances reported by Amabile, Carson, F. B. Earle, Erlenmeyer, F. H. Hubbard, C. H. Hughes, Mattison, and others, of congenital opium habit where opium was needed to preserve the infant during the first months of life, states that inheritance of the opium habit seems at first an isolated phenomenon, but zoologists have pointed out that pigeons whose ancestors were fed on poppies became intractable to opium. Murrell found that the same was relatively true in England of persons descended from Bedfordshire ancestors who used infusions of poppies as a prophylactic against malaria. Nervous diseases were, however, relatively prevalent in these districts. Narcotic habits in the ancestors produces descendants in whom the normal checks on excessive nervous action are removed, so that paranoiacs, periodical lunatics, epileptics, hysterics, congenital criminals, congenital paupers, or other degenerates result. This influence is most strongly exerted when the maternal ancestor is the one affected, for to her is committed the development of the ovum prior to conception and of the child subsequently. If either is interfered with by a habit, a being defective in some respects is the result. The direct inheritance of the opium habit has been shown experimentally by Levenstein, who found by experiments on pregnant dogs and rabbits that the use of opium during pregnancy produced either abortion or still-births, or rapidly dying offspring.

In a similar manner Rennert[87] has shown that lead-poisoning occurring in the mother is apt to produce macrocephalism with frequent idiocy in the child.

This brings the observer face to face with the problem of morbid heredity. It may at once be admitted that, as has been claimed by a large number of observers, morbid heredity, especially in its graver forms, is much less frequent than at first would be expected. J. P. Gray, of Utica, New York, went so far as to claim that disease is never transmitted, but this is contradicted by his own hospital reports, which, to the day of his death, contained a table headed, “Statistics of hereditary transmission of the disease.” It is true, however, that the descendants of a victim of morbidity or abnormality do not always exhibit the morbidity or abnormality of the ancestor. In some cases all apparent morbidity or abnormality is wanting. In other cases slighter abnormalities are to be detected. Here the observer is brought face to face with the operation of two general principles which are interdependent: the transmutation of heredity and atavism, or “throwing back” as the cattle breeders call it. Tennyson voices the general erroneous opinion of the always evil effects of atavism in his “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After”:—

“Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good
And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.”

As Kiernan has shown, atavism at times tends to preserve the type, and offsets the influence of degeneracy. This element of atavism underlies not merely the production of the sound scions of degenerate stock, but also those in whom the degeneracy affects the earlier and not the later acquirements of the race. The contrast of the moral imbecile who is unable to acquire an idea of right, or the idiot of the lowest grade who can hardly be taught to keep himself clean, with the otherwise sound, sane, able victim of hereditary gout, is very great. Yet all the links of the chain connecting, in the same family, these contrasted types, can often be found. The law laid down as to absolute extinction through degeneracy by Morel and others can only be regarded as absolutely true when applied to a given type rather than the race as a whole. Indeed, environment may play a part in preserving a degenerate who would otherwise die out. Thus in societies at a certain stage of culture imbeciles, paupers, lunatics, and congenital criminals live at large and even propagate through legal marriage. The seemingly enormous increase of the defective class which occurs in frontier communities when the classes begin to be placed in public institutions is an excellent illustration of this.

Manifestations of morbid heredity result not in inheritance of the whole defect but in disturbance of relations of structure and hence of function, producing, as Kiernan remarks, a constitutional deficiency which takes the line of least resistance. The extent and direction of this line of least resistance depend on the amount of healthy atavism which separate organs and structures of the body preserve. The line of least resistance sometimes taken is excellently illustrated in the occurrence of stigmata already pointed out in the case of epileptic guinea-pigs.

This unilateral predisposition (which, as Kiernan has shown, is due usually to heredity or intra-uterine causes) may be artificially produced. Kasparek[88] cut one sciatic nerve of a guinea-pig and (after all inflammatory symptoms had subsided) injected the opposite ear with cultures of pus microbes. He killed the animal after some days. The sound side was found free from suppuration, but immense abscesses existed on the side of the cut nerve. Such local predisposition was pointed out by Merrill[89] over forty years ago. This condition occurs, as Féré has shown,[90] in many systemic and infectious diseases which presents a localisation due to heredity, or determined by anterior morbid state of the nervous symptom. Sometimes these manifestations are limited to the side free from nervous trouble.

As a rule they attack the side which is the predominant seat of nervous symptoms. Féré points out that in chromatic iris asymmetry the iris (coloured part of the eye) is most coloured on the side most affected by arrest of development. Localisation of nervous trouble occurs on the side most affected by hare-lip. Heuse has observed the co-existence on the same side of congenital cataract and of deformities of the skull and chest.

Hernia is often an expression of hereditary defect (Le Double) taking the unilateral line of least resistance. Testicle inflammations of microbic origin (venereal or otherwise) occur as a rule on the side where hernia is located in the groin. In one-sided malformations of ovary or testicle (decreased or increased in size, or changed in shape or location) microbe inflammation almost always occurs at the seat of the anomaly. This principle is illustrated in the experiments of Dupuy.[91] Here, while as a rule, the scions of guinea-pigs (rendered epileptic by section of the sciatic nerve) were epileptics and had deficient toes, still in some epilepsy resulted without the toe anomaly, while still more rarely the toe anomaly was present without the epilepsy.

The same principle is shown by certain observations of Charin and Gley,[92] who for five years conducted experiments calculated to throw light on the influence on the offspring of parental reception of virus. Either both male and female have been inoculated with the bacillus of blue pus or its toxins, or but one animal has been inoculated. The results have not been uniform. Most frequently there ensues sterility, abortion, or birth of progeny that die immediately. In rare instances the offspring survive; more rarely still are they healthy. Certain rabbits (born of these undeveloped animals) were provided with enormous epiphyses (ends of bones), the shafts of the bones being shortened. Two rabbits were born of a couple of which the male alone received inoculations of sterilised culture. Five rabbits were born of these two, of which two were normal, and a third (whose ears were rudimentary) died in a few days. In the remaining two the ears comprised only fragments with jagged upper edges. The tails were but two centimetres long. The external orifice of the vagina (one rabbit was a male and the other a female) was oblique. One of the limbs (the hind in the male and the fore in the female) was much shorter than its fellow, the difference being four centimetres. The shortened limb ended in a kind of stump, there being no foot or toes.

These experiments illustrate the transformation of heredity, that is the manifestations which show the line of least resistance that the morbid heredity has taken. As Moreau (de Tours) remarks,[93] “An incorrect conception of the law of heredity looks for identical phenomena in each succeeding generation. Some have refused to admit that mental faculties were subject to heredity, because the mental characters of the descendants were not precisely those of the progenitors. Each generation must copy the preceding. Father and son must present the spectacle of one being, having two births, and each time leading the same life, under the same conditions. But it is not in the heredity of functions, or of organic or intellectual facts that the application of the law of heredity must be sought, but at the very fountain-head of the organism, in its inmost constitution. A family whose head is insane or epileptic does not of necessity consist of lunatics or epileptics, but the children may be idiotic, paralytic, or scrofulous. What the parents transmit to the children is not insanity, but a vicious constitution which will manifest itself under various forms in epilepsy, hysteria, scrofula, rickets, &c. This is what is to be understood by hereditary transmission.”

The same position has been taken by Rush,[94] the pioneer American alienist; by Maudsley,[95] by Krafft-Ebing,[96] by Meynert, by Mercier, by Féré,[97] and others. Morel,[98] the chief accepted apostle of the doctrine of degeneracy, remarked, nearly at the same time as Moreau, that “heredity does not mean the very disorder of the parents transmitted to the children with the identical mental and physical symptoms observed in the progenitors, but means transmission of organic disposition from parents to children. Alienists have, perhaps, more frequent occasion than others for observing not merely this hereditary transmission, but likewise various transformations which occur in the descendants. They are aware that simple neuropathy (nervous tendency) of the parents may produce in the children an organic disposition resulting in mania or melancholia, nervous affections which in turn may produce more serious degeneracy and terminate in the idiocy or imbecility of those who form the last link in the chain of hereditary transmission.”

What is true of the organism as a whole is true of the cells forming its organs. It should be remembered that while cell life is altruistic or subordinated to the life of the organ, through the law of economy of growth, recognised by Aristotle, and through it to the life of the organism as a whole, altruism is not complete enough to prevent entirely a struggle for existence on the part of the cells or the individual organs. With rise in evolution this struggle decreases, to increase with the opposite procedure of degeneracy. From it results the phenomenon of arrested and excessive development.

As Dareste has shown (and the fact has been corroborated by Spitzka[99]), embryologists can imitate natural malformation of the nerve centres by artificial methods. By wounding the embryonic and vascular areas of the chick’s germ with a cataract needle, malformations are induced, varying in intensity and character with the earliness of the injury and its precise extent. More delicate injuries produce less monstrous development. Partial varnishing or irregular heating of the egg-shell, in particular, results in anomalies comparable to microcephaly (little head) and cerebral asymmetry. This latter fact (showing the constancy of the injurious effect of so apparently slight an impression as the partial varnishing of a structure not connected with the embryo at all directly) suggests the line of research to be followed in determining the source of the maternal and other impressions acting on the germ. What delicate problems are to be solved in this connection may be inferred from the fact that eggs subjected to the vibration and shocks of a railroad journey are checked in development for several days, or permanently arrested. A more delicate molecular shock during the maturation of the ovum, during its fertilisation, or finally during embryonic stages of the more complex, and therefore more readily disturbed and distorted human germ, accounts for the disastrous effect of insanity, emotion, or other mental or physical shock of the parent on the offspring. The cause of the majority of cerebral deformities exists in the germ prior to the appearance of the separate organs of the body. Artificial deformities produce analogous results because they imitate original germ defects, either by mechanical removal, or by some other interference with a special part of the germ. Early involvement of the germ is shown by the fact that the somatic malformations of the hereditary forms of insanity often involve the body elsewhere than in the nervous axis. The stigmata of heredity—defective development of the uro-genital system, deformities of the face and skull, irregular development of the teeth, misshapen ears and limbs—owe their grave significance to this fact. Like deformities of the brain, these anomalies are also more marked and constant with the lower forms of the hereditarily based systematised perversions of the mind than the higher. It is easy from these results to understand how far and how the nervous system has its part in the disorders of general development. It can be easily understood how the individuals who present most deformities are equally those who suffer from most decided disorders of the nervous system.

These morbid manifestations of heredity occur in certain categories, either local as to organs or structures, or affecting the body as a whole. These categories Moreau (de Tours) lucidly sums up as: First, absence of conception; second, retardation of conception; third, imperfect conception; fourth, incomplete products (monstrosities); fifth, products whose mental, moral, and physical constitution is imperfect; sixth, products specially exposed to nervous disorders in order of frequency as follows—epilepsy, imbecility or idiocy, deaf-mutism, insanity, cerebral paralysis, and other cerebral disorders; seventh, lymphatic products; eighth, products which die in infancy in a greater proportion than sound infants under like conditions; ninth, products which, although they escape the stress of infancy, are less adapted than others to resist disease and death.

The explanation of these morbid manifestations lies in the very foundations of embryology. Bearing in mind the principles of individuation pointed out by Spencer, it is easily understood how reversal of this principle would produce greater and greater destruction of the complex functions, resultant on increased reproductive power of cells (whose environment is not suited to such reproductions) and thus lead to such a struggle for existence as to produce sterility (from interdestruction of the ovum cells, or the cells forming the spermatozoon). This condition is further increased by the operation of two biologic principles. The first relates to the cells or organs forming an organism. The second, as Von Baer has shown, deals with the relation of the organs to each other.

Vertebrate embryos of a common type, at their origin, assume successively a number of common forms before definitely differentiating. Dareste points out that supernumerary organs do exist in these common forms at one phase of embryonic life. This community of embryonic types and this last fact explain repetition of teratologic types or monstrosities in vertebrates. This community of origin, moreover, indicates that a higher vertebrate embryo contains in essence the organs and potentialities of lower vertebrates, and that under the influence of heredity or accidental defect an organ belonging to another species may develop, or an organ constant in a species may be lacking in an individual, without the necessity of explaining the immediate effects by distant atavism. Some anomalies found among degenerates recall types less elevated than man, and very distant from him, even his possible Lemurian precursor.

It is obvious from the principles already demonstrated that the secondary effects of infectious disorders and injuries are reproduced in various types in the offspring. The malformations of the limbs experimentally demonstrated to be due to ancestral infection by Charin and Gley, and to injury by Dupuy, noticeably occur in men. Moor has observed supernumerary fingers in an imbecile girl; her grandfather and one uncle are polydactylous and insane. F. S. Coolidge has had under observation a case which excellently depicts these deformities in men. Kiernan[100] reports the case of a man whose grandfather and father had been prophets of the Lord, as shown by the fact that on one side of the body they had six toes and six fingers, and the two sides of the body were unequal, the six-fingered one being smaller than the other. This father and grandfather were highly regarded in a secluded vale in Norway as religious teachers and for their power to cure disease by charm. The father had ten children, of whom three were born dead and six died in infancy. Kiernan’s patient was the only survivor of this family. During boyhood he experienced various persecutions, some by unseen agencies, some on the part of the villagers, who towards the end of his father’s life also persecuted the father. These persecutions seem to have been withdrawal by the peasants of their belief in the father’s ability to charm sickness out of cattle, evidently due to growing popular intelligence. This was regarded by the father as the result of persecution by the devil, who was desirous of trying him as Job was tried. It was revealed to him that his son should likewise suffer persecution, which would also be the work of the devil. The son heard unseen persons, who pointed him out in school as the son of the sham wizard. In consequence he was avoided by all his schoolmates except the members of one family who still retained their belief in the father’s supernatural powers. Into this family the son married; then, pressed by his unseen persecutors, he came to the United States. Here he worked at his trade as a carpenter, and had no return of any persecutory delusions, although he still believed he was a prophet. On admission to the insane hospital, twenty years after his arrival in the United States, he was found to have such a decidedly asymmetrical body that suspicions of general hemiatrophy were excited, but the condition was found to be congenital. The hand and foot of the seemingly atrophic side had six fingers and toes. The man had been sent to the insane hospital in consequence of an altercation with a neighbour who was clearly in the wrong; but both being arrested, the patient’s amour propre was aroused and he declared his prophetship, which led to his trial and commitment as a lunatic. His wife, who applied for his discharge, was also a paranoiac. They had had ten children, of whom three were still living at the ages of six, eight, and ten. Two of these were six-toed and six-fingered unilaterally, and one of them, a boy, had the peculiar general asymmetry of the father. The third child was seemingly normal.

The experimental results of Charin and Gley, on the degeneration produced in offspring by ancestral microbic infection, tend to show that not merely are the extremities affected, but in certain cases the whole organism, along lines laid down by Moreau’s categories. This is demonstrated by study of the degeneracy stigmata of phthisical families. Alex. James, Ricochon,[101] C. E. Paddock,[102] and others have shown that (in addition to the ordinary stigmata) the biologic stigmata of degeneracy (such as plural and quickly repeated births) are frequent among phthisical families. The same phenomena often occur in families whose scions are attacked with diabetes, obesity, articular rheumatism, cancer and gout. De Giovanni[103] finds that particular nervous states exist in those predisposed to tuberculosis, whom he divides into erethists (restless), torpids, and energetics. There is a diminutive heart, whose right ventricle has comparatively exaggerated dimensions, while the arteries have lessened calibre.

A family illustrating excellently the transmutation of morbid heredity is one followed through five generations by Kiernan.[104] A farmer lived twenty miles distant from his nearest neighbour, whose only child he married. The daughter had led a lonely life till her courtship at the age of 28 by the farmer, then three years younger. The farmer married her for $300, after having impregnated her. He then found lead on his farm and went to a city. A stock-company bought his farm and launched him into the stock market, where he made money more as a cunning tool than an adventurer. He became a high liver, gouty and dyspeptic, and died with symptoms of gouty kidney at 70. The couple had five children. The eldest, a son, became a “Napoleon of Finance,” but, inheriting his father’s cunning, died wealthy and within the pale of the law. He married a society woman, the last scion of an old family. The second child, a daughter, was club-footed and early suffered from gouty tophi. She married a society man of old family who had cleft palate. The third child, a daughter, had congenital squint. She married a man who suffered from migraine of a periodical type. The fourth child, a daughter, was normal. She married a thirty-year-old active business man, in whom ataxia developed a year after marriage. The fifth child, a son, was ataxic at eighteen. The children of the “Napoleon of Finance” and the society woman were an imbecile son, a nymphomaniac, a hysteric, a female epileptic who had a double uterus, and a son who wrote verses and was a society man. The cleft-palated society man and club-footed woman had triplets born dead and a squinting, migrainous son who, left penniless by his parents, married his cousin the nymphomaniac daughter of the “Napoleon of Finance,” after being detected in an intrigue with her. The migrainous man and squinting daughter of the farmer stockbroker had a sexually inverted masculine daughter, a daughter subject to periodical bleeding at the nose irrespective of menstruation, as well as chorea during childhood, a normal daughter, a deaf-mute phthisical son, a daughter with cloacal formation of the perineum, an ameliac son, a cyclopian daughter (with one central eye) born dead, and, finally, a normal son. The sexual invert married the versifier son of the “Napoleon of Finance.” The progeny of the normal daughter of the farmer stockbroker and the ataxic husband were a dead-born, sarcomatous son, a gouty son, twin boys paralysed in infancy, twin girls normal, a normal son, and a son ataxic at fourteen. The progeny of the nymphomaniac daughter and her strabismic, migrainous cousin were a ne’er-do-well, a periodical lunatic, a dipsomaniac daughter who died of cancer of the stomach, deformed triplets who died at birth, an epileptic imbecile son, a hermaphrodite, a prostitute, a double monster born dead, a normal daughter, and a paranoiac son. The ne’er-do-well married his nose-bleeding cousin. The gouty son of the farmer’s normal daughter married the hysteric daughter of the “Napoleon of Finance.” They had a son born with such general asymmetry as to seem hemiatrophic, a prostitute, dead triplets, a male sexual invert, a colour-blind daughter, and a normal son. The colour-blind daughter married the paranoiac grandson of the “Napoleon of Finance.” The progeny of the sexual invert and the versifier, who were soon divorced, were a daughter with periodical nymphomania, who had some artistic and literary ability, and a son who died of gastric cancer. The scions of the ne’er-do-well and his nose-bleeding cousin were a moral imbecile, a “bleeder,” a stammering daughter who had an uvular deformity, a deaf-mute with undescended testicle, dead-born triplets, an infantile paralytic son, and dead-born quadruplets. The progeny of the paranoiac and his colour-blind cousin were an exophthalmic daughter, an epileptic with undescended testicle, a cleft-palated imbecile with a cloaca, dead-born quadruplets, an idiot boy, and a “bleeder.”

Doutrebente reports the following family history: First generation: Father intelligent, became melancholic, and died insane. Mother nervous and emotional. Second generation: Ten children; three died in childhood, seven reach maturity as follows: Daughter A, melancholiac; daughter B, insane at twenty; daughter C, imbecile; daughter D, a suicide; son E, imbecile; son F, melancholic; son G, a melancholic. Third generation: A has ten children; five die in childhood, one is deformed, one has fits of insanity, one is eccentric and extravagant, two are intelligent and marry, but are childless. B leaves no issue. C has one child, a deformed imbecile. D has three children; one is an imbecile, one dies of apoplexy at twenty-three, and the third is an artist described as “extravagant.” E has two children; one dies insane, the other disappears and is supposed to have committed suicide. F is childless. G has one child, who is imbecile.[105]

Strahan[106] gives a genealogy which shows very clearly the close kinship existing between the cancerous diathesis and other forms of constitutional degeneration whose outward manifestations are infantile convulsions, suicide, epilepsy, insanity, lymphatism, and sterility. The father of this family died of stomach cancer at sixty. He had a brother who cut his throat at fifty-six; the mother, an apparently healthy woman, died of a fit, at the age of fifty-four. To this pair seven children were born: 1. A son who died of stomach cancer at fifty-eight. 2. A son who died in convulsions at thirteen weeks. 3, 4, and 5. Three daughters who died of phthisis, one at sixteen, the other two later in life, and after being married for many years; none left any issue. 6. A son who is epileptic, and has twice been confined in lunatic asylums; married, but no issue. 7. A son who is sane, and enjoying fair health. Here the taint in the mother appears to have been slight; still, it was there, and while certainly preventing reversion, it doubtless deepened the degeneration of the father in the children. In the father’s stock the taint was much deeper. While it was exhibited as cancer in him, it took the form of suicidal impulse in his brother. In the children of this pair the disease of the father is transmitted to the eldest son; but can it be denied, Strahan asks, that the infantile convulsions, the liability to tubercular disease, the epilepsy, the insanity, and the marked sterility were but the varying evidences of the degenerate nature, inherited from a father who might have died earlier of some acute disease, taking the secret of his nature with him?

The value of the principle of atavism in off-setting degeneracy is nowhere better illustrated than in the history of famous families of degenerates like those of the Binswangers, of “Margaret,” of the Jukes, as well as those reported in France, Germany, Austria, Russia, and the Scandinavian countries. The Rougon-Macquart family of Zola (which had its actual prototype in the Kerangal family described by Aubry[107]) had, like these, several scions in whom former normality regained its power through atavism. Sometimes this atavism is not shown to any greater extent than a slight modification of the abnormality or morbidity.

Telegony, the so-called and much-debated heredity of influence, whereby the children of a second marriage resemble the first husband, may be explained by a biologic principle demonstrable in the lower animals, whereby conjugation not sufficient to fecundate ova is sufficient so to impress them that when finally fecundated they bear characteristics of the first conjugation. Its part in either normal or degenerate heredity is but slight. Some instances charged to it might be attributed to mental impression on the mother.

Luys[108] excellently sums up the whole question of heredity when he remarks: “Heredity governs all the phenomena of degeneracy with the same results and the same energy as it controls moral and physical resemblances in the offspring. The individual who comes into the world is not an isolated being separated from his kindred. He is one link in a long chain which is unrolled by time, and of which the first links are lost in the past. He is bound to those who follow him, and to the atavic influences which he possesses; he serves for their temporary resting-place, and he transmits them to his descendants. If he come from a race well endowed and well formed, he possesses the characters of organisation which his ancestors have given him. He is ready for the combat of life, and to pursue his way by his own virtues and energies. But inversely, if he spring from a stock which is already marked with an hereditary blemish, and in which the development of the nervous system is incomplete, he comes into existence with a badly balanced organisation; and his natural defects, existing as germs, and in a measure latent, are ready to be developed when some accidental cause arises to start them into activity.”

CHAPTER IV

Consanguineous and Neurotic Intermarriage

Byron has sung[109] of the old popular belief in the advantages of cross-breeding, which arose originally in the practice of exogamy (marriage outside the tribe), or, more often, outside those having the same totem, or coat-of-arms. In all probability casual observation of deformities after intermarriage enforced the prohibition which arose after the killing of female children had led to exogamy. Totemic relationship was often far from being consanguineous. The idea of incest is, as Byron’s stanza denotes, of religious origin rather than innate.[110] Its criminal nature is often removed by priestly dispensation in Latin countries. From this practice sprang the medical, theologic, and legal notions to which D. H. Tuke[111] thus refers: “The danger arising from marriages of consanguinity has been insisted upon from time to time by medical writers, and has been recognised by ecclesiastical authority, civil law, and by popular feeling. As regards ecclesiastical and civil law, it would be more correct to say that the marriage of those very nearly related has been forbidden on other grounds than that of the alleged danger to mental health. At the same time the justice of such laws receives support if medical observation leads to the conclusion that consanguineous marriages tend to generate idiocy and insanity.”

The biologic evidence from the experiments of Maupas on parthenogenesis, elsewhere cited, is seemingly supported by the results of animals breeding in-and-in. The evidence advanced against such marriages seems at first sight exceedingly strong from a biologic standpoint in man.

Rilliet[112] cites cases tending to show that consanguineous marriages, in themselves pernicious, tend with certainty to lower vital force. The effects he divides into two categories; those which relate to the parents, under which head are:—

a. Failure of conception.

b. Retardation of conception.

c. Imperfect conception.

Those which relate to the progeny:—

a. Imperfections of various kinds.

b. Monstrosities.

c. Imperfect physical and mental organisation.

d. Tendency to diseases of the nervous system, such as epilepsy, imbecility, idiocy, deaf-mutism, paralysis, and various cerebral affections.

e. Tendency to strumous diseases.

f. Tending to die young.

g. Tendency to succumb to disease which others would easily resist.

C. H. S. Davis,[113] of Meriden, Connecticut, states that intermarriages in families lead to a degeneration that manifests itself in deaf-mutism, albinism, and idiocy. Isaac Ray[114] is of the opinion that consanguineous marriages repeated through successive generations account for the numerous instances of insanity and idiocy occurring in quiet rural populations of New England, far from the excitements of city life, which are generally supposed to be more productive of mental unsoundness.

S. M. Bemiss,[115] of New Orleans, Louisiana, giving a report of the condition of the offspring of 580 intermarriages of first cousins, gathered mostly by medical men from nearly every State in the Union, says: 2,778 children were born of these cousins, of whom 793 were defective, 117 deaf and dumb, 63 blind, 231 idiotic, 24 insane, 44 epileptic, 189 scrofulous, 53 deformed, and 637 died early.

While these figures seem very demonstrative, they contain a great many elements of error. One of these is incidentally pointed out by Arthur Mitchell,[116] who finds that under favourable conditions of life the apparent ill effects of consanguineous marriages are frequently almost nil, whilst if the children are ill-fed, badly housed and clothed, the evil may become very marked. He calculates that the percentage of consanguineous marriages generally in Scotland is 1·3, or ten times less than with the parents of idiots. Taking his figures a strong case seems to be made out in support of the opinion that idiocy, among other evils, results from intermarriage. Langdon Down, although his figures are not of so unfavourable a character, admits consanguinity as one of the causes of deterioration.

George H. Darwin concluded from a careful investigation that about 4 per cent. of all marriages in England are between first cousins, and between 2 and 3 per cent. in the smaller towns and in the country; with these he compared the rate of similar marriages among the parents of lunatics and idiots in asylums, and found it to be about 3 or 4 per cent.—not higher, therefore, than in the general population.

Huth[117] cites instances occurring regularly at the present day among certain isolated communities (St. Kilda, Pitcairn, and Iceland) without apparent evil consequences to the race. Such marriages were common among the North American Indians and the South Sea Islanders, people among whom idiocy and other degenerate hereditary conditions were remarkably rare. These cases, Strahan remarks, deal with peculiarly healthy communities. Therein lies the secret of such intermarriage proving innocent of evil to the offspring. Were such intermarriage common among the degenerates the result would be disastrous.

In 1869 the New York State Medical Society[118] appointed a committee to investigate the influence of consanguineous marriages upon the offspring. Their results show clearly that if the family be free from degenerate taint, marriage among its members in no way diminishes the chances of healthy offspring. This conclusion is in accord with the findings of recent investigators like Anstie, George Darwin, and A. H. Huth, according to whom there is no greater amount of morbidity or abnormality among the offspring of consanguineous parents than among the children of parents not so related, provided the parents be equally free from tendency to disease or degeneration. With a perfectly healthy stock, as every breeder of animals knows, remarks Strahan,[119] “in-and-in breeding” may be practised with impunity, but where the stock is tainted with disease or imperfection, safety is only to be found in “crossing.”

Where the error lay in the old doctrine, upon which was founded the prohibition of consanguineous unions, was not, as Strahan remarks, in asserting that disease and deformity were more often met with in children of these than in those of other unions, for such is true, but attributing these unhappy results to the mere fact that the parents were related by blood. Over and above the fact that these consanguineous marriages are almost certain to transmit in an accentuated form any defect or tendency to disease already present in the family, there is no physiological reason why such marriages should not take place. Breeders of prize stock frequently breed “in and in,” not only with impunity, but with marked benefit. But this fact, while going to prove that it is not the mere blood relationship of the parents which induces the degeneration so often found in the children of consanguineous marriages, can but rarely be advanced as an argument in support of the marriage of blood relations. The stock-raiser only permits the more perfect members of his flocks and herds to continue their kind, and for this reason the “in-and-in” breeding is innocuous, just as it would be in the human family under like conditions. But where shall we find the perfect human family? Such families are certainly rare. The laws of natural life have been so strained and perverted that almost every family nowadays has a taint or twist of some kind, and as all such imperfections are transmitted and rapidly deepened and fixed in the family by the intermarriage of its members, it is best that such unions should be forbidden.

Recently acquired characters, whether physiologic or pathologic, are very liable to disappear when the individual bearing such characters intermarries with another not having the same character. The natural tendency in all such cases is to revert in the offspring to the normal or healthy type, so that unless the new character be very deeply impressed upon the parental organism it is almost certain it will not appear in the offspring, if the other parents have nothing of the character. But when both parents are possessed of the character, whether it be physiologic or pathologic, this natural tendency to revert to the original is often overborne and the character is repeated in an accentuated form in the offspring.

Now this accentuation of all family characters is what must always happen in the case of consanguineous marriages. If there be any taint in the family each member of the family will have inherited more or less of it from the common ancestor. Take the case of cousins, the descendants of a common grandparent who was insane and of an insane stock. Here the cousins are certain to have inherited more or less of the insane diathesis. Even if the taint has been largely diluted in their case by the wise, or, more likely, fortunate marriages of their blood-related parents, yet will they have inherited a certain tendency to nervous disease, and if they marry they must not be surprised if that taint appears in an aggravated form in their children. Some of the children of such parents are generally idiotic, epileptic, dumb, or lymphatic, and the parents marvel whence came the imperfection. It may be in some cases that the parents, and possibly the grandparent, of the unfortunate children, have not up till that time displayed any outward evidence of the tendency to disease which they have inherited and handed on to their descendants; and, not looking farther back, the parents boldly assert that such a thing as insanity, epilepsy, scrofula, &c., is unknown to their family. They themselves have never been insane; why, then, should their children? In like manner children may be epileptic, blind, deaf-mute, lymphatic, cancerous, criminal, drunkards, or deformed from direct inheritance, and yet the family line be honestly declared to be healthy. Hence the truth of Sir William Aitken’s maxim, that “a family history including less than three generations is useless and may even be misleading.” From the foregoing it is evident that the similarity of temperament induced by a common environment, and which Strahan would call “social consanguinity,” must be a potent factor in the production of all hereditary degenerations. Living under similar customs, habits and surroundings, labouring at the same occupation, indulging in the same dissipation, tend to engender like diseases and degenerations, irrespective of any blood relationship. Hence it not seldom happens that persons not even distantly related by blood are, in reality, much more nearly related in temperament than cousins, or even nearer blood relations who have experienced widely different modes of life. This “social consanguinity” is the great curse which dogs every exclusive tribe and class, and hurries them to extinction. It has largely aided real or family consanguinity in the production of the diseases and degenerations which have so heavily fallen upon the aristocracies and royal families of Europe.

A crucial test of the opposing positions taken respectively in such a positive manner by Bemiss and Strahan would be a family intermarrying extensively, but placed under favouring conditions unlikely of themselves to create degeneracy. Excellent cases of this kind are furnished by Bourgeois[120] and Thiébault.[121] Bourgeois gives the history of his own family, which was the issue of a union of the third degree of consanguinity. During the ensuing 160 years there were ninety-one marriages, of which sixteen were consanguineous. All of these latter were productive. There was not a single case of malformation, or other physical or mental disease in the offspring.

Thiébault reports the case of a slave-dealer who died in the year 1849 at Whidah, Dahomey, leaving behind him four hundred disconsolate widows, and about one hundred children. By the order of the king the whole family were interned in a particular district, where reigned the most complete promiscuity. In 1863 there were children of the third generation. Thiébault, after verifying these facts, states that at that time, although these people were born from all degrees of incestuous unions, there was not a single instance of deaf-mutism, albinism, blindness, cretinism, or other congenital malformation. From these cases it is evident that the position of Strahan is not too strongly taken.

While it is true that “like clings to like,” still this does not imply kinship, but it very often implies likeness in mental characteristics. This tendency has been shown to be present in the neurotic by Roller,[122] De Monteyel,[123] Kiernan,[124] Bannister,[125] and Manning,[126] so far as Germany, France, the United States, and Australia are concerned. Bannister puts the statistical proof of this tendency very forcibly as follows: “There are in Illinois, according to the most recent estimates, in round numbers, about 6,000 insane, or one to a little over 500 of the population. Even if we double, treble, or quadruple this frequency to include all that have been or are to be insane, as well as those insane at the present time, it would not appear that there was much probability of two insane persons being married according to any ordinary law of chances. In fact, we find four out of the 104 with insane heredity had both father and mother insane. In one of these cases the insane heredity involved both parents and both grandparents on each side, though in the case of the latter the histories show it only as collateral. Besides these, three patients had direct paternal and collateral maternal heredity; two had direct maternal and collateral paternal heredity, and in one case there was collateral heredity of insanity on both sides. This makes altogether nearly 10 per cent. of those with insane heredity with it on both sides, maternal and paternal, and thus favoured with a double opportunity to inherit mental disease. If we add to this the instances where, with insanity of one parent, there is reported either epilepsy, hysteria, or drunkenness, ‘brain disease,’ nervousness, &c., of the other, the ratio of double inheritance rises to over 20 per cent.”

The beneficial effects which may result from atavism are, it will be obvious, offset by this tendency of the neurotic to intermarry, thus perverting the principle of atavism to the assistance of degeneracy.

The age of the parent plays a part in degeneracy. Conger[127] (whose results have been corroborated by Joseph Workman, of Toronto, and Kiernan,[128] of Chicago) points out that in all degenerative forms we must take into consideration this factor, since it determines the development of degeneracy in childhood. Hereditary taint may be transmitted to descendants as a simple neuropathy, as a neurosis, or as a defect of development reaching even to idiocy. Conger finds the prevailing age, especially the age of the mothers of degenerates, is often between twenty and twenty-five years, and that hence there exists a relation between this age and the greater transmission of degeneracy to the offspring. Marro, who has specially investigated the influence of the age of the parents, both in the normal population and among criminals,[129] finds that among all classes of criminals there is an excess of immature parents (under 26) or senile parents (over 40), and that only petty offenders possessed a normal number of mature parents (26 to 40 years). A man between 20 and 25 is in as favourable condition for procreating degenerates as the very aged. Because of incompleted organic development he has been unable to free himself from hereditary taint which he transmits to his descendants, but which in maturer age, through the influence of adaptation, evolution, or education, might perhaps be more or less notably modified.

The organism between 20 and 25 is yet incomplete; education has not been able to exert much influence in determining those possible changes which are adapted to modify congenital tendencies. In a word, the individual between 20 and 25 feels too much the influence of atavic characters, and too readily transmits to his posterity the brands of degeneracy. Experience has made it well known that the children of the aged readily show degenerate types. Many children of old fathers have undoubtedly inherited all the characters of the weakness of the age in which they were begotten. Old age represents the period of retrogression, of involution, and hence readily transmits the mark of degeneracy. The children of either too young or too old parents, failing to escape hereditary predisposition, may from birth inherit those characters which are proper to incomplete organic development or to the period of involution.

Kiernan has had under observation a Nova Scotian family of Scotch extraction, the mother of which continued to bear children until she was 63 years old. There had been no pregnancy between 50 and 56. At 56 a son was born who had ear, jaw and skull stigmata, and became a periodical lunatic at 25. A son, born a year after, was a six-fingered idiot, with retinitis pigmentosa. (These last expressions of degeneracy are, as Darier[130] has shown, often associated. Darier’s cases had the following hereditary antecedents: One father had hemeralopia; one mother had defective vision; a grandfather was blind at 30; a grandfather was blind in one eye, and an uncle had congenital iris coloboma. Only one patient examined did not have hemeralopic descendants. Six patients examined belonged to five different families, all consisting of five or six children, one-third of whom had hemeralopia. Among thirty-five children there were eleven hemeralopes and two six-fingered children, who died too young to determine the existence of retinitis pigmentosa. The disease in all began in childhood, and hemeralopia was absent in but one case.) Three of the next children (two boys and a girl) became paralytic idiots in infancy. Here the degeneracy was expressed in that tendency to miliary aneurismal weakness of arteries to which E. C. Spitzka,[131] called attention over a decade ago. One of the next children was a periodically sexual invert female. The last child was an epileptic. The children born before the age of fifty were normal and averaged 60 years of age.

Matthews Duncan,[132] Arthur Mitchell, and Langdon Down, have called attention to the influence of premature and late marriage in the production of idiocy. Factors capable of producing idiocy are of course capable of producing less decided expressions of degeneracy.

CHAPTER V

Intermixture of Races

Defoe, in his Trueborn Englishman, outlines a factor of great importance in degeneracy.[133] Race intermixture is much more common than is generally believed, owing to that ethnologic error consequent on the discovery of Sanscrit, which tests race by speech. Keane[134] excellently explodes this error by the following table:

Profoundly mixed as this table indicates European races to be, it is far from representing the full extent of race mingling. The primitive worship of the Slavonic Czernebog by the Saxons in England demonstrates a Slavonic strain, derivable, as Kiernan[135] remarks, from their contact with the Wends of the Baltic. Not merely are the Aryan races of Europe mixed together, but the blood of all has a pre-Aryan and a Turanian dash. In Great Britain, as Taylor[136] and others have shown, the Iberian type is found in Wales and Scotland as well as elsewhere, though in lesser degree. These admixtures date back to palæolithic times when, although, as Keane remarks, the predominant type of skull was dolicocephalic (or long-headed), the brachycephalic (or round-headed type) had begun to appear in America, then connected by land with both Africa and Europe. In the subsequent neolithic time, while the type is at first generally brachycephalic, it soon becomes mesatocephalic (mixed long and round-headed), pure brachycephals and dolicocephals becoming rare. Vogt went so far as to maintain that were the three chief anthropoid apes developed further, two dolicocephalic and one brachycephalic type of man would result; the first two from the chimpanzee and gorilla, the last from the orang. The orang descendant would have long arms and red hair. The chimpanzee descendant would be of small size, dark colour with slender bones and jaws. The gorilla race would have massive chest, big bones, massive jaws and teeth. These three types appear in Great Britain and Ireland and traces of their blood are still detectable in living men. Sir Walter Scott draws an excellent picture of the “orang” type in Rob Roy, whose hero, according to reliable tradition, represented the Pict type. Gomme[137] has lately shown that these races persisted long enough to stamp their savage beliefs on coming races and intermingled with them. The Neolithic race in Great Britain was dark, of feeble build, short stature, with dolicocephalic skulls. This race remained to the historic period, as the Silures in Great Britain and the Firbolgs in Ireland. It had high cheek-bones and oblique eyes, as Kiernan[138] points out. Towards the middle of the neolithic period this race was conquered by a brachycephalic, tall, long-armed, muscular race, with florid complexion and yellowish or red hair.[139] Scott’s Rob Roy is an example of this type. A third race of fair complexion with prognathous face, dolicocephalic skulls, of tall stature, great bones, great chest development and massive jaws, later invaded Great Britain. While these races resemble Vogt’s hypothetical descendants of the anthropoid apes, it should be stated that there is not the slightest evidence for this line of descent. Writers who ignore these race characteristics have often brought serious criticism and even discredit on the doctrine of degeneracy. Lombroso, starting from the correct premise, that wide departure from the race type is evidence of degeneracy, erroneously cites in illustration Virchow’s departure from the German type, Byron’s departure from the English type, O’Connell’s dolicocephalic departure from the mesatocephalic Irish type, and Robert Bruce’s neanderthaloid departure from the Scandinavian type. As Kiernan has shown,[140] Virchow, as his name denotes, is a German-speaking Slavonic Wend; Byron was a Celto-Scandinavian Scotchman; O’Connell was born in a district conquered by the tall dolicocephalic race which invaded Ireland. The Bruce type of skull is still found among the purer Norwegians, Frisians, Swedes, and Danes, and was common just before his day and just after, as has been shown by Taylor.

As the intermingling of races began early, the question of the existence of pure races to-day, or even during the historic period, is an open one. The Hebrews have been comparatively pure since the return from the Captivity. Before that, as the history of Solomon’s foreign marriages demonstrates, they were a raceless chaos, the Semitic element predominating. Researches by Flinders Petrie[141] and others show that the Egyptians were a mixture of Turanians, Hamites, Aryan and Semite peoples imposed on a negroid basis. When these elements were finally fused, the race bred relatively true, although the lower classes tend to the negroid type and the higher to the Caucasic.

The Koreans, as Keane remarks, are a mixture of two primitive races, one white and one yellow. The Japanese, whose ancestors emigrated to Japan from Korea are, according to Topinard,[142] the product of the addition of three distinct types to that forming their Korean ancestors. The Caucasic to a small extent, the Polynesian to a greater, and the Malay to a still greater, are mixed with the original Korean.

The Chinese are neither a homogeneous people nor a pure race, albeit the relatively few Mantchus are dominant. The Aryan of India, on whom Max Müller laid such stress, is known to be, despite a rigid caste system, a non-Aryan race, feebly infused with a modicum of Aryan blood. The so-called “Gypsy” seems, of all the races of India, to have retained most Aryan speech and type as well as its original semi-nomadic waggon-journeying tendencies in the midst of settled civilisation. Ghetto seclusion long helped to preserve relative purity of race in the Jew, but despite vagabond surroundings the “Gypsy” has remained even purer.

Great as has been the mixture of even widely separated types like the three races described as mingling in Great Britain and Ireland, even greater admixture occurred in comparatively late historic times. The so-called Scotch-Irish (whose blood enters so largely into the dominant race of the United States) are, despite their speech (much more Teutonic and monosyllabic than English), as Kiernan[143] has shown, a raceless chaos of Gaelic and Cymric Celts, Lowland Scotch, French Huguenots, Danes (Celto-Teuto-Slaves),[144] Palatinate Germans, Magyars, English Puritans, Hollanders, Swedes, Protestant Italians, Poles, and Spaniards. The intermixture of the dark, small-boned, dolichocephalic, orthognathous (with in-drawn jaws) race first with the brachycephalic, prognathous, big-boned, red-haired race, and then with the dolichocephalic prognathous, deep-chested, big-boned, fair race, must have produced in the British Isles as marked variations in type as now occur from the admixture of the Indian and negro. These are especially noticeable in the Marshpee Indians of Cape Cod, the Long Island tribes and the “Red Bones” of South Carolina. The Marshpee tribe is an admixture of Anglo-Saxon, Portuguese, Indian, and negro. The Indian element, while still demonstrable, is lessening. Some of the older people still retain Indian characteristics. A girl of ten was negro in all respects except her hair. An adult whose mother was half white, half Marshpee, while the father is negro, had all the negro characteristics except the skin, which was Indian in type, and the jaws, which were slender. Another adult who had a negro great-grandfather, Marshpee mother, and a three-fourths Marshpee father, had large, negro-like jaws, Indian hair, skin, and cheek-bones. Another adult had a Portuguese maternal grandmother, negro grandfather, an Indian-white paternal grandmother and Indian-negro paternal grandfather. His hair, jaws, and nose were negro, his cheek-bones were high, his upper and lower jaws met so that the front teeth occluded.[145] The like condition obtains in the Long Island Indians, but to a less extent with the “Red Bones,” who, after the type was formed, avoided admixture with the negro.

The influence of race intermixture in the production of degeneracy is easily settled. Basing their opinion on the notorious sterility of the hybrid offspring of the horse and ass, certain biologists have assumed like results in man and have cited the alleged absence of Australian half-breeds in evidence. Since the hare and rabbit, dog and wolf, sheep and goat produce breeds intermediate between the parents, fertile while environment is unchanged, horse and ass sterility cannot be accepted as of much value in settling the question. Recent researches have shown that the half-breeds which survived birth among the Australians were killed in accordance with tribal usages regulating population in accordance with food supply.

Whether the results of race intermixture prove degenerate or not will turn largely on the environment. The mulatto is certainly better adapted to the white environment than the pure negro, albeit less so than the white. That race intermixture may, however, determine degeneration, is shown by the relapse into voodooism and cannibalism of the Haiti and Louisiana French hybrids, and the Anglo-Saxon hybrids of Liberia, who contrast disadvantageously with the Arabianised Moslem Mandingoes and Veys, which last have advanced so far as to devise a system of writing. The extent of the influence of environment is shown in the career of the Dumas family, which is of Haitian-negro origin. The grandfather was a general in the French army, the father and son were two stars in the literary firmament. The sculptor, Edmonia Lewis, was of similar stock to these. Evidences of degeneracy were rare among the Marshpee Indians, as I have elsewhere shown.[146]

The Abyssinians have preserved that antique type of Christianity which had Jewish usages; they had their own literature, alphabet, and old type of civilisation. According to Keane, the present inhabitants of Abyssinia form an extremely complex ethnical group in which it is not always possible to distinguish the constituent elements. The prevailing colour is a distinct brown, shading northwards to a light, olive, fair complexion, southwards to a deep chocolate and an almost sooty black. There are Abyssinians who may certainly be called black, and in whom the negro strain is revealed in the somewhat tumid lip, small nose, broad at base, and frizzly, black hair. But the majority may be described as a mixed Hamito-Semitic people, who, beyond question, belong fundamentally to the Caucasic division. While the Hamitic, Semitic, and the Latin branch of the Aryans are admitted to form a fertile, progressive admixture with the negro, the reverse is commonly assumed to be the case with the English speaking Celto-Teutons. Daniel Wilson[147] is of opinion that this is not true as to millions of the coloured race who now constitute the indigenous population of the Southern States. They are at home there in a climate to which the white race adapts itself with very partial success. The offspring of white fathers and of mothers of the African races, they have multiplied to millions; and now, with the recently acquired rights of citizenship, and with the advantage of education within their reach, the country is their town. The very social prejudices against miscegenation protect them from the effacing influence to which the Indian half-breed is exposed, by ever-recurrent intermarriage with the dominant race. As yet there are discernible the various degrees of heredity from the mulatto to the quinteron. But the abolition of slavery has placed the coloured race on an entirely new footing. Left as it now is, free to enjoy the healthful, social relations of a civilised community, and protected, by the very prejudices of race and caste, from any large intermixture with the white race, it can scarcely admit of doubt that there will survive on the American Continent a Melanochroi of its own, more distinctly separated from the white race, not only by heredity but also by climate influences, than the “dark Whites” of Europe are from the blonde types of Hellenic, Slavic, Teutonic, or Scandinavian stock. This condition will be modified by the fact that the negro American, like the others, is a traveller and, with a rise of culture, tends to city life.

The admixture with the white has reduced negro prognathism and dolichocephaly. It must, however, be admitted that these reductions had already been begun in Africa. Sir H. H. Johnston, however, fully agrees with the negro writer[148] who holds that the “pure and unadulterated Negro cannot, as a rule, advance with any certainty of stability above his present level of culture; that he requires the admixture of a superior type of man.” But the white and black races are “too widely separated in type to produce a satisfactory hybrid”; hence Johnston thinks that, “the admixture of yellow that the Negro requires should come from India, and that Western Africa and British Central Africa should become the America of the Hindu. The mixture of the two races would give the Indian the physical development which he lacks, and he, in his turn, would transmit to his half Negro offspring the industry, ambition, and aspiration toward a civilised life which the Negro so markedly lacks.”

On the whole, race intermixture will not tend to elevate the race where there is a decided difference in the state of evolution of the two races, and moreover especially where, as is usually the case, the mother is of the inferior race. It must be obvious that, given a negro pelvis and the head of a white, results damaging to the offspring cannot but occur. And these results are of a nature likely to be transmitted by heredity. The same would hold true with other races as well. Although the differences between the Hawaiian and the white are much less than those between the negro and the white, it is notorious that while the labours with pure Hawaiians are easy, those with half-whites are difficult. The same conditions have been observed from time to time between different breeds of dogs, whose pelves vary. Therefore it is safe to assume that admixtures of races of different grades of evolution will, if carried to any great extent, tend to render the superior race more liable to the action of the factors producing degeneracy. Dixon[149] has shown that mulatto families tend to disappear, if they be not crossed with either black or white, and that the limit of descent is the fourth generation. He has also pointed out that morbid proclivities and retrogressive tendencies are peculiarly rife among mulattoes. The fact, long ago shown by Menatta,[150] that the conflict for existence between brain growth and reproductive organ growth at puberty, results, in the mulatto, as in the negro and anthropoids, in the triumph of the reproductive, indicates that the mulatto has factors of degeneracy which would be fatal to the establishment of an intermediate type on the environment of the white. While Menatta is in error in regarding skull mal-development as the cause, when it and brain growth disturbance are defects due to the same cause, still general observation supports his opinion that “negro children are sharp, intelligent, and full of vivacity, but on approaching the adult period a gradual change sets in. The intellect seems to become clouded, animation giving place to a sort of lethargy, briskness yielding to indolence. We must necessarily infer that the development of the negro and white proceeds on different lines. While with the latter the volume of brain grows with the expansion of the brain pan, in the former the growth of the brain is, on the contrary, arrested by the premature closing of the cranial sutures and laternal pressure of the frontal bone.” Since, as Havelock Ellis remarks,[151] even the highest races do not fulfil the promise of evolution they make before puberty, anything which tends still further to impede the fulfilment must be regarded as a factor of degeneracy. Hence intermixture with an inferior race, having an inferior type of pelvis, would tend to degeneracy.

CHAPTER VI

Toxic Agents

The toxic agents which influence the race toward degeneracy, exert that deterioration in a mode which closely resembles that of the degenerative powers of the acute and chronic contagions and infections. The acute poisonings by these toxic agencies resemble the acute, nervous and other exhaustion caused by the toxin of the germs underlying the infections and contagions. The chronic conditions due to these toxic agents agree in many respects with the chronic states produced by the infections and contagions. The toxic agencies are divisible into those belonging to the condiments, medicines, foods and beverages, and those arising from occupations.