HEREDITARY TRAITS. 



37 



and, moreover, unless extra care is given to it, 

 death is sure to ensue in early childhood." May 

 not idiot children in savage communities have an 

 even worse chance of survival than under the Ro- 

 man Empire? and may not dolts, boobies, and 

 stupids ct hoc genus omne, among savages, have 

 such inferior chances in the infantine and, later, 

 in the adult struggle for existence, that we may 

 explain thus the comparative rarity of these va- 

 rieties in savage communities ? It certainly does 

 not seem to have been proved, as yet, that civili- 

 zation, per se, is favorable to the development of 

 insanity. 



The liking for strong drink, as is too well 

 known, is often transmitted. It is remarked by 

 Dr. Howe that " the children of drunkards are 

 deficient in bodily and vital energy, and are pre- 

 disposed by their very organization to have 

 cravings for alcoholic stimulants. If they pursue 

 the course of their fathers, which they have more 

 temptation to follow and less power to avoid than 

 the children of the temperate, they add to their 

 hereditary weakness, and increase the tendency 

 to idiocy or insanity in their constitution ; and 

 this they leave to their children after them." 

 Whatever opinion we may form on the general 

 question of responsibility for offenses of commis- 

 sion or of omission, on this special point all who 

 are acquainted with the facts must agree, admit- 

 ting that in some cases of inherited craving for 

 alcoholic stimulants the responsibility of those 

 who have failed and fallen in the struggle has 

 been but small. " The fathers have eaten sour 

 grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." 

 Robert Collyer, of Chicago, in his noble sermon, 

 " The Thorn in the Flesh," has well said : " In 

 the far-reaching influences that go to every life, 

 and away backward as certainly as forward, chil- 

 dren are sometimes born with appetites fatally 

 strong in their nature. As they grow up, the 

 appetite grows with them, and speedily becomes 

 a master — the master a tyrant ; and, by the time 

 he arrives at manhood, the man is a slave. I 

 heard a man say that for eight-and-twenty years 

 the soul within him had had to stand, like an 

 unsleeping sentinel, guarding his appetite for 

 strong drink. To be a man at last, under such 

 a disadvantage — not to mention a saint — is as 

 fine a piece of grace as can well be seen. There 

 is no doctrine that demands a larger vision than 

 this of the depravity of human nature. Old Dr. 

 Mason used to say that ' as much grace as would 

 make John a saint would hardly keep Peter from 

 knocking a man down.' " 



There are some curious stories of special 



vices transmitted from parent to child, which, if 

 true, are exceedingly significant, to say the least. 1 

 Gama Machado relates that a lady with whom he 

 was acquainted, who possessed a large fortune, 

 had a passion for gambling, and passed whole 

 nights at play. " She died young," he proceeds, 

 "of a pulmonary complaint. Her eldest son, 

 who was in appearance the image of his mother, 

 had the same passion for play. He died of con- 

 sumption, like his mother, and at the same age. 

 His daughter, who resembled him, inherited the 

 same tastes, and died young." Hereditary pre- 

 disposition to theft, murder, and suicide, has been 

 demonstrated in several cases. But the world at 

 large is naturally indisposed to recognize congeni- 

 tal tendency to crime as largely diminishing re- 

 sponsibility for offenses or attempted offenses of 

 this kind. So far as the general interests of the 

 community are concerned, the demonstrated fact 

 that a thief or murderer has inherited his un- 

 pleasant tendency should be a raison de plus for 

 preventing the tendency from being transmitted 

 any further. In stamping out the hereditary ruf- 

 fian or rascal by life-imprisonment, we not only 

 get rid of the " grown serpent," but of the worm 

 which 



"Hath nature that in time would venom breed." 



An illustration of the policy at least (we do 

 not say the justice) of preventive measures, in 

 such cases, is shown in the case of a woman in 

 America, of whom the world may fairly say what 

 Father Paul remarked to gentle Alice Brown : it 

 " never knew so criminal a family as hers." A 

 young woman of remarkably depraved character 

 infested, some seventy years since, the district 

 of the Upper Hudson. At one stage of her youth 

 she narrowly, and somewhat unfortunately, es- 



1 The following statement from the researches of 

 Brown-Sequard seems well worth noting in this con- 

 nection : " In the course of his masterly experimental 

 investigations into the functions of the nervous sys- 

 tem, he discovered that, after a particular lesion of the 

 spinal cord of Guinea-pigs, a slight pinching of the 

 skin of the face would throw the animal into a kind 

 of epileptic convulsion. That this artificial epilepsy 

 should be constantly producible in Guinea-pigs, and 

 not in any other animals experimented on, was in 

 itself sufficiently singular ; and it was not less surpris- 

 ing that the tendency to it persisted after the lesion 

 of the spinal cord seemed to have been entirely recov- 

 ered from. But it was far more wonderful that the 

 offspring of these epileptic Guinea-pitrs showed the 

 same predisposition, without having been themselves 

 subjected to any lesion whatever; while no such ten- 

 dency showed itself in any of the larsre number of 

 young bred by the same accurate observer from par- 

 ents that had not thus been operated on." 



