94 REMARKS ON DR.' CALDWKLl/s 



feeling of kindness to human nature, call for the prevention of such 

 marriages. Similar objections may be justly urged against young 

 women marrying men far advanced in years. It is rare for the de- 

 scendants of old men to be distinguished for high endowments, 

 either of body or of mind : age has impaired their constitutional 

 qualities, which being transmitted to their children, the practice 

 tends to deteriorate our race : wherefore, Dr. C. concludes, old men 

 ought, in no case, to contract marriages likely to become fruitful. 

 As respects persons seriously deformed, or in any way constitution- 

 ally enfeebled, particularly those who are predisposed to insanity, 

 scrofula, pulmonary consumption, gout, or epilepsy ; all such per- 

 sons should conscientiously abstain from marriage. The union of 

 such individuals cannot be defended on moral grounds, much less 

 on that of public usefulness : it is selfish to an extent but little 

 short of crime : its abandonment or prevention would tend, in a 

 high degree, to promote the improvement of mankind. 



Another source of human deterioration is a long series of family 

 intermarriages. Be the cause what it may, Dr. C. affirms, both 

 history and observation testify to the fact, that the descendants 

 from marriages between parties related by consanguinity always 

 degenerate : in time, they become both mentally and corporeally 

 enfeebled. Another grand source of the degeneracy of human 

 beings is the marriage of the indigent, who are destitute of a com- 

 petent supply of wholesome food for themselves and their children. 

 This is a fearful cause of deterioration. Reason assures us that a 

 sound and powerful machine cannot be constructed out of damaged 

 materials ; and to this decision of reason experience unites its tes- 

 timony. Stinted and unwholesome fare acts on mankind as it does 

 on other forms of living matter ; it injures organization, and checks 

 its development. Both the vegetables of a barren soil and the ani- 

 mals nourished by them are feeble, and diminutive, and unsightly ; 

 so is man, when pinched and dispirited by poverty and its concomi- 

 tants. Dr. C. regards the state of the mother's health during preg- 

 nancy as a cause which operates decidedly upon the constitution of 

 her unborn infant j and, he observes, it is vain to allege, in opposi- 

 tion to this, that the children of delicate, enervated, and even sickly 

 mothers, are sometimes healthy and robust: they would have been 

 much more so had the health of their mothers been in a better con- 

 dition. All this being certain, he adds that females, while in this 

 state, cannot too carefully avoid every thing calculated to injure or 

 alarm them. They should take much exercise in the open air, 

 overcoming the feeling which induces them to practice an injurious 



