320 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



repression of the sexual passions and emotions producing 

 mental pain and stress causing exhaustion of neural energy. 

 The more evidence of degeneracy there is in the progenitors and 

 their stocks, the greater will be the number of children born 

 suffering with feeble-mindedness, epilepsy, criminality, or insanity. 

 If both parents are feeble-minded, or one feeble-minded and the 

 other epileptic, the chances are that all the offspring will be 

 feeble-minded or epileptic. No good can come from a stock in 

 which there is mental deficiency; it is otherwise in the case of 

 mental instability, for that very instability which leads to a 

 mutation from the " honourable ordinary " may lead to the 

 genesis of constructive imagination and a temper which, disre- 

 garding moral traditions and social usages, is often found 

 associated with genius. History and biography proclaim that 

 the genius of imagination of the poet, of the prophet, of the 

 artist, of the philosopher, and the lust for action of the world's 

 great leaders of men have been so frequently associated directly 

 or indirectly with epilepsy, insanity, or a neuropathic tendency 

 that Dryden's lines have become a recognised truism : 



" Great wit to madness sure is near allied, 

 And thin partitions do their walls divide." 



Still, if a nation (in order to progress) must have an admixture 

 of mental instability in the form of genius and insanity, a 

 streak of it is sufficient ; for that nation will be the most 

 virile which can breed from the greatest number of the 

 " honourable ordinaries " endowed with the attributes of civic 

 worth, courage, honesty, and common sense. Moreover, it is a 

 great mistake to suppose that a stock that does not show 

 pathological mental instability in the form of epilepsy or 

 madness cannot therefore produce genius. One of the striking 

 instances of hereditary genius is the Bach family. In his 

 work on hereditary genius Galton did not refer to his own 

 remarkable family, but I will throw on the screen the abridged 

 pedigree of the Darwin-Galton-Wedgwood family, and it is of 

 interest here to remark that Erasmus Darwin anticipated 

 many of the theories of evolution and heredity subsequently 

 elaborated and demonstrated by his illustrious grandsons 

 Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. Genius often springs up 

 in a stock we know not how or why, and with meteor-like 

 flash it disappears. How far the epoch makes a man of genius, 

 or the man of genius makes the epoch, it is difficult to say. 



