640 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MOXTHLY. 



cellence occurs naturally to all, namely, the necessity for and the high 

 premium set upon physical superiority. Among a people where "all 

 were for the state," and patriotism was the ruling passion, each man 

 held out his life to the state whenever she saw tit to use it, and the state 

 took care that the sword-arm should be well developed. Gunpowder 

 and the implements of modern warfare had not yet rendered all men 

 equal on the battle-field. To have gained a prize at the Olympian 

 games was enough to raise a man, and with him his family, from ob- 

 scurity into prominence. As the race has progressed, the need for 

 physical force has grown less and less, until at the present day the 

 term physical force, or, as we oftener hear it, brute force, has almost 

 become an opprobrious epithet. 



.V fallacious notion has somewhere crept in that an 'mtdhctual man 

 must be below par physically, and that the one faculty is necessarily 

 eultivated at the expense of the other. The old proverb, mens satia 

 in corpore sauo, has been flouted as an absurdity. So much, very brief- 

 ly, for the first cause of race-degeneration ; the second, and the one to 

 Avhich this paper would direct attention, is the influence of hereditary 

 diseases. This factor has never received the attention it should have 

 had at the hands of the writers on social science. The races of which 

 we have been speaking had little of this element to contend with. 

 The weaklings were either deliberately exposed and left to die, as in 

 the case of the Spartans, or if they attained maturity they were held 

 in such low esteem that they willingly kept in the background. Look 

 for a moment at our modern civilization, and mark its diametricallv 

 opposite tendency. Every day hospitals are being erected to nurture 

 the diseased and imperfect specimens of our race, and every year thou- 

 sands of children are bv skill and care saved from the death to which 

 Xature would consign them. All this accords with our enlarojed no- 

 tions of humanity, and reflects great credit on the zeal of the philan- 

 thropist and the science of the physician, but it exerts a baneful effect 

 on the race. To one who has had access to any large city hospitals, 

 it is a pitiful sight to see the multitude of children who are tided over 

 a few Fears, and sent out into the world branded with an hereditary 

 taint, to propagate their wretched breeds. The limits of this paper 

 will not allow any extended statistics, nor the nature of it warrant a 

 special discussion of hereditary diseases, but there are two whose ef- 

 fects are apparent to all, consumption and insanity. The former, con- 

 sumption, using the term in its widest sense, has forages produced the 

 most frightful ravages. For example, in England, from 1S37 to 1841, 

 of the total number of deaths from all causes sixteen per cent were 

 from consumption. In Philadelphia, from 1840 to 1849, the death-rate 

 was one of consumption to six and a half from all other causes, or about 

 fifteen per cent. 



Of late vears. however, the mortalitv has been somewhat reduced 

 by a more successful plan of treatment. As regards insanity " in the 



