ZOOLOGY. 261 



emotions find their well-known expressions. This language we can 

 interpret. But how are we to interpret the language of the higher 

 faculties, supposing them to be in action ? What can we know of the 

 baby's imagination, abstraction, or comparison ? We may warrantably 

 reject the old notion, of the mind's being from the first well furnished 

 with truths of wide generality, " innate ideas," as they were called ; 

 but the advance of psychology, founded on physiology, has made it 

 pretty certain that if not furnished with ready-made truths, if not en- 

 riched with innate ideas, the mind is from the first furnished with he- 

 reditary tendencies and aptitudes, even in directions purely intellectual. 

 Inasmuch as memory presupposes the experiences which are remem- 

 bered, abstraction presupposes the experiences which furnish the 

 materials, and ratiocination presupposes the experiences which furnish 

 the propositions, we are forced to conclude that these actions of the 

 soul emerge gradually ; but the various epochs of their emergence and 

 development are necessarily hidden from us. According to the 

 platonic theory, the intellectual condition of the baby is transcendent- 

 ally superior to that of the philosopher, for he has just quitted the 

 higher world of existences, and has descended amid the shadows, the 

 phenomena. If he is conscious of the previous state of existence, what 

 a mist of vanishing and futile shadows must this world aj^pear to him. 



MABBIAGES OF CONSANGUINITY. 



A recent writer in the Westminster Review, after discussing the 

 evidence pro and con, relative to the injurious effects of marriages be- 

 tween blood-relations, thus finally expresses himself as led to the fol- 

 lowing conclusions : - 



On the whole evidence before us, we cannot conclude otherwise 

 than that the very general opinion, that there is some special law of 

 nature which close-breeding infringes, is founded rather on a kind of 

 superstition than on any really scientific considerations. If we look 

 upon the question as one of science, we find that the facts given as 

 evidence in favor of this opinion, can for the most part without difficulty 

 be reduced under the ordinary laws of inheritance. On the other hand, 

 the known facts brought to light by investigation among the lower ani- 

 mals and plants, are such as positively to disprove this hypothesis, as 

 regards them ; and it would require much more stringent proof than any 

 one has ever yet attempted to bring forward, in order to justify us in 

 believino; that man is under the action of phvsiolo<ncal laws differing 



d? j. */ <^ t^ 



from those which obtain in the rest of the animal kingdom. The aspect 

 of the question before us from the practical point of vie\f is, however, 

 somewhat different. Here further evidence is still required, and will, 

 no doubt, be collected. It is, of course, conceivable, whether probable 

 or not, that there may exist at the present time, in civilized communi- 

 ties, so few families really free from all taint of disease or imperfection, 

 as to render intermarriage of blood-relations unsafe by the action of 

 the ordinary laws of inheritance. We are ourselves strongly dis- 

 posed to disbelieve, in the absence of strict evidence, in any such de- 

 generate condition as the normal state of modern humanity ; but it is 

 this point, and nothing further, which observation and statistics are ca- 

 pable of deciding ; and in order even to do this, the observations must 



