102 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



ciation of its force from assigning to it the subordinate rank of a secon- 

 dary form attached to the Subjunctive. 



Some general remarks by President Felton, upon the connec- 

 tion of the Greek and Latin modal forms as illustrated by the 

 Sanskrit, led Professor Agassiz to offer some remarks, express- 

 ing a general disbelief in the supposed derivation of later lan- 

 guages from earlier ones, he regarding each language and each 

 race as substantially primordial, and ascribing the resem- 

 blances and coincidences of language to a similarity in the 

 mental organization of the races. Whereupon President Felton 

 pointed out some of the lexical and inflectional coincidences 

 among affiliated languages, which were in his opinion utterly 

 inexplicable upon any supposition other than that of historical 

 relation. 



Professor BovN'cn made some general observations on the sup- 

 posed hereditability of peculiar traits of bodily and mental 

 organization, and especially of mental disease. 



Tliere has been, he thought, an increasing tendency of late years fb 

 enharge the number of such traits, and to insist more and more upon 

 the certainty of their transmission. It has even been proposed to pro- 

 hibit by law the intermarriage of persons who have mental or bodily 

 defects or diseases which might be transmitted to their otfspring. And 

 as to insanity, there is too much reason to fear that persons have been 

 actually driven mad through the fear, which has been carefully incul- 

 cated upon them, of having inherited insanity. It Avill be admitted, 

 that, if there is anything which can foster and rapidly develop some 

 latent tendency towards mental disease, it is dreading, and brooding 

 over the dread, of that great calamity, regarded as an inevitable event, 

 which must sooner or later happen. In the opinion of many, crime 

 and sin are no longer imputable to individual men and women, but to 

 what the lawyers call " the act of God," which entailed upon the offend- 

 ers inevitably a wicked temper, a perverted will, or a diseased brain. 

 The only proper name to be given to this doctrine is physiological fa- 

 talism. It rests upon a perversion of one of the darkest sayings of the 

 old Jewish Scripture, that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon 

 the children, even to the third and fourth generation ; — a seemingly 

 harsh doctrine, though, in the meaning which was probably intended, it 



