382 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cases the opposite prevails, and jurors are strangely stubborn in 

 their unreasoning convictions for the prisoner. This is naturally 

 the outcome of placing untrained men in positions which they 

 can not fill, and requiring of them clear judgment under circum- 

 stances where it is almost impossible to act normally. 



WHY CHILDREN LIE. 



By NATHAN OPPENHEIM, M. D. 



IT is not many years ago that the occurrence of pulmonary 

 tuberculosis in a person stamped the family of the sufferer as 

 tainted. So lax was the common as well as the professional logic, 

 and so imperfect were the observations drawn from experience, 

 that the fact of inheritance clearly seen in some diseases was im- 

 mediately applied to all cases where there was any ground for the 

 analogy. What was true of one case must necessarily be true of 

 all others that seemed similar ; and the growing belief in heredity 

 helped to make this opinion progressively stronger. Even to-day 

 there still remains with thousands of people a belief in the 

 " taint " of a family that has unfortunately had a tubercular dis- 

 ease in one of its members, and the general public is merely be- 

 ginning to awaken to the distinction between an inherited disease 

 and an inherited predisposition to that disease. As a matter of 

 fact there exists between these two things the widest space ; in- 

 deed, a predisposition may act as a warning, may insure a greater 

 care and a better conformity to laws of right living, so that the 

 threatened persons are often able to avoid dangers which formerly 

 they might have dreaded as inevitable. 



Tuberculosis is not by any means the only sickness which 

 carries with it a widespread " taint." In the same way that an 

 almost insuperable objection to a man or a woman contemplating 

 marriage was a " consumptive strain in the blood," so an equally 

 potent obstacle was relation to a lunatic. There are still other 

 parallels between the two cases : one's brother who died of pul- 

 monary consumption cast a cloud upon one's physical reputation ; 

 but if that same brother had suffered from a white swelling of the 

 knee (tuberculosis of the joint), it carried but little significance 

 with it. Likewise, mania cursed a whole family in all its ramifi- 

 cations ; but marked eccentricity, kleptomania, or wrong conduct 

 amounting to what we now call moral insanity would be entirely 

 harmless, would be strictly confined to the person in whom it 

 appeared. 



This lack of knowledge and the consequent laxity in judgment 

 have wide-reaching results. Outside of those immediately appar- 



