HEREDITARY DISEASES AND RACE-CULTURE. 641 



different civilized nations of the world, there is an average of one in- 

 sane in live hundred inhabitants. The undoubted steady increase of 

 the insane under care and observation would seem to be greater than 

 can be fairly accounted for by the greater attention now given to their 

 welfare " (Maudsley). These two instances, recognized as the most 

 important in the hereditary class, will serve as examples ; it is not de- 

 sired here to show in what proportion of cases disease is transmitted 

 from generation to generation ; the writer hopes to be able at a later 

 date to give some general laws respecting hereditary affections. 



The heredity of genius has been fully proved by that very inter- 

 esting writer and accurate observer, Francis Galton, and he has put 

 forward in a masterly way the claims of eugenics, or race-culture. 

 This must be effected, he urges, by a rational system of natural selec- 

 tion. " Men," says the same author, " have long been exempted from 

 the full rigor of natural selection, and have become more mongrel in 

 their breed than any other animal on the face of the earth." The laws 

 of natural selection, considered broadly, prevail among men more than 

 at first sight appears. 



Among the lower animals, as Mr. Darwin has shown, strength, 

 beauty, voice, and such qualities, determine a choice : the rustic maiden 

 often chooses her husband because he is stronger physically than his 

 rivals ; the more intellectual woman would naturally look for mental 

 superiority, and so on. Now, the strongest point in any rational natu- 

 ral selection must be first and foremost pure blood ; and by that is not 

 meant blood that has come down through a long line of ancestors 

 merely, but blood which is free from any hereditary taint. We are 

 all familiar with the member of some "old family," a slight, flat- 

 breasted, precociously intelligent child, whose slender, graceful neck, 

 bright eyes shaded by long lashes, thin, white skin through which the 

 blue veins show, declare to the educated eye the presence of tuber- 

 cular disease. We know that, if such a child matures, the odds are 

 overwhelming that its offspring will continue to disseminate the dis- 

 ease. Or take any number of insane persons, with whose family his- 

 tory you are more or less familiar, and the certainty with which you 

 will be able to trace the disease to hereditary predisposition is wonder- 

 ful. We know of no government sufficiently strong to forbid the 

 banns of a man whose lungs are full of tubercle, or of a woman upon 

 whose person cancer has shown itself. The only way to begin to 

 stamp out hereditary disease is to direct the tide of public opinion 

 toward it. We would not if we could enforce the Spartan rule, but 

 we can and should exert a power they knew not of, the press, and 

 educate our people to the full importance of this subject. Even our 

 proverbial mauvaise honte can not object to showing the young of 

 both sexes the horrors of a legacy of an hereditary disease. Those 

 who are to become the fathers and mothers of our next generation 

 should be warned before they make a step into the dark, and should 



VOL. XXIX. 1 



