MORBID HEREDITY. 391 



generation, 1893) has endeavored to demonstrate the constancy of 

 these associations in a special category of artists and literary men 

 whose imagination seems to rejoice in its departure from common 

 ideas. He is liable to criticism for not having comprehended that 

 the madness of these supposed degenerates consisted simply in 

 seeking to surprise or scandalize, and that at bottom their thoughts 

 were not much different from those of their contemporaries. 

 While this criticism may be just as to M. Nordau, it can not clear 

 the authors concerned from the suspicion of insanity. 



Civilization favors the production of exceptional beings, men 

 of genius as well as those most degraded by vice or by mental 

 perturbations. The most civilized nations are as much distin- 

 guished by the number of their insane and criminals as by that of 

 their men of talent. Civilization produces variation or excites the 

 tendency to it, and it is manifested chiefly in the masculine sex. 

 The parallel development of insanity, genius, and crime consti- 

 tutes one of the most interesting illustrations of the tendency 

 to variation which characterizes the evolution of mankind, and 

 which results in a progressive inequality, against which the re- 

 strictive laws of individualism are of no avail. 



Psychical disorders are often associated in families and indi- 

 viduals with other diseases of the nervous system, either growing 

 out of lesions or not connected with known lesions nervous affec- 

 tions. The relative frequency or nervous manifestations, whether 

 isolated or associated with nervous or other diseases which we 

 shall consider, is so predominant that all such family morbid 

 manifestations may be designated under the name of neuropathic 

 family. 



Nervous diseases may be hereditary, and pass directly from 

 father to son ; examples of such are locomotor ataxy, epilepsy, 

 and hysteria; but indirect and dissimilar heredity, as in psy- 

 chopathies, is more usually observed. Family connections between 

 diseases from lesions of the nervous system and nervous affections 

 are proved by frequent coincidences among relatives, and also by 

 their manifestations in the same person, either at the same time 

 or in different periods of his life. Not rarely, further, are mental 

 and neuropathic troubles met with in the history of the same per- 

 son ; and, moreover, a number of diseases are marked by both 

 classes of symptoms. 



The already somewhat chaotic picture of morbid heredity 

 would still be incomplete if we omitted to add that among the 

 members of a nervous family we often meet individuals affected 

 with disorders of nutrition gout, chronic rheumatism, diabetes 

 quite often hereditary diseases which, as much by their course as 

 by their relationship, deserve the name of nutritional nervous af- 

 fections. It should be observed further that other diseases, para- 



