98 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



movements toward social and religions reform are signs of individual 

 initiative and individual force. The country which stamps out indi- 

 viduality will soon live in the mass alone. 



XX. A Frencli writer has claimed that the decay of religious spirit 

 in France is connected with the growth of religious orders of which 

 celibacy is a prominent feature. If religious men and women leave no 

 descendants, their own spirit, at least, will fail of inheritance. A peo- 

 ple careless of religion inherit this trait from equally careless ancestors. 



XXI. Indiscriminate cliarity has been a fruitful cause of the sur- 

 ^ ival of the unfit. To kill the strong and to feed the weak is to provide 

 for a progeny of weakness. It is a French writer again, who says that 

 "Charity creates the misery she tries to relieve; she can never relieve 

 half the misery she creates.'' 



There is to-day in Aosta, in Northern Italy, an asylum for the care 

 and culture of idiots. The cretin and the goitre are assembled there, 

 and the marriage of those who can not take care of themselves ensures 

 the preservation of their strains of unfitness. By caring devotedly for 

 those who in the stress of life could not live alone for a week and by 

 caring for their children, generation after generation, the good people 

 of Aosta have produced a new breed of men, who can not even feed 

 themselves. These are incompetent through selection of degradation, 

 while the 'man of the hoe' is primitively ineffective. 



The growth of the goitre in the valleys of Savoy, Piedmont and 

 A^alais is itself in large part a matter of selection. The boy with the 

 goitre is exempt from military service. He remains at home to become 

 the father of the family. It is said that at one time the government of 

 Savoy furnished the children of that region with lozenges of iodine, 

 which were supposed to check the abnormal swelling or the thyroid 

 gland, known as the goiti'e. This disease is a frequent cause of idiocy 

 or cretinism, as well as its almost constant accompaniment. It is said 

 the mothers gave the lozenges only to the girls, preferring that the boys 

 should grow up to the goitre rather than to the army. The causes of 

 goitre are obscure, perhaps depending on poor nutrition, or on mineral 

 substances in the water. The disease itself is not hereditary so far as 

 known, ])ut susce])tibility to it certainly is. V>y taking away for outside 

 service those who are resistant, the heredity of tendency to goitrous 

 swelling is fastened on those who remain. 



Like these mothers in Savoy was a mother in Germany. Not long 

 since, a friend of the writer, passing through a Franconian forest, found 

 a young man lying senseless by the way. It was a young recruit for the 

 army who had got into some trouble with his comrades. They had 

 beaten him and left him lying with a broken head. Carried to his home, 

 his mother fell on lier knees and thanked God, for this injury had saved 

 him from the army. 



