CURIOUS FACTS OF INHERITANCE. 693 



an instinct dating far back to the time when the ancestors of the ass 

 were exclusively desert animals, and so unaccustomed to the sight of 

 running water as to be confused and terrified by it. If any one ob- 

 serves a field of lambs at play, he will notice with what delight they 

 frisk upon any hillock within their reach. Here we have probably a 

 trace of the time when the progenitors of our sheep were Alpine ani- 

 mals, and possessed the habits of the chamois. 



In the realm of disease, the facts of inheritance are most numerous, 

 and are daily accumulating. Here they are no longer, alas, curious 

 and amusing, but terrible, fateful, overwhelming. No fact of Nature 

 is more pregnant with awful meaning than the fact of the inheritance 

 of disease. It meets the physician on his daily rounds, paralyzing his 

 art, and filling him with sadness. The legend of the ancient Greeks 

 pictured the malignant Furies pursuing families from generation to 

 generation, and rendering them desolate. The Furies still ply their 

 work of terror and death ; but we have stripped them of the garb 

 which superstition threw around them, and they now appear to our 

 eyes in the more intelligible but not less awful form of hereditary 

 disease. Modern science, which has cast illumination into so many 

 dark corners of Nature, has shed a new and still more lurid light on 

 the words of the Hebrew Scripture : " The sins of the fathers shall 

 be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." 

 Instances of hereditary disease abound on every hand. Fully fifty per 

 cent of cases of gout are inherited. The proportion is not much less in 

 that fell destroyer of families, our national scourge, consumption. 

 Cancer and scrofula run strongly in families. Insanity is hereditary 

 to a marked degree ; but fortunately, like many other hereditary dis- 

 eases, tends to wear itself out, the stock becoming extinct. Nearly 

 all defects of sight are occasionally inherited. Sir Henry Holland 

 says truly that "no organ or texture of the body is exempt from the 

 chance of being the subject of hereditary disease." Probably most 

 chronic diseases which permanently modify the structure and func- 

 tions of the body are more or less liable to be inherited. 



The important and far-reaching practical deductions from such 

 facts — affecting so powerfully the happiness of individuals and fami- 

 lies and the collective welfare of the nation — will be obvious to re- 

 flective minds, but can not be dwelt upon in the present article. — 

 Chambers's Journal. 



An Austrian official report on over-pressure in the public schools recommends 

 as a remedy for the evil, which is pronounced real, a better division of the holi- 

 days by giving longer vacations at Christmas and at Easter ; and suggests the 

 doing away of the abuses of requiring written exercises, and the committing of 

 too much to memory. Dr. Joseph Heim insists that, whatever reform is adopted, 

 should include the consulting of the physical no less than the mental growth of 

 the young. 



