i88 Journal of Comparative Neurology. 



thoughtlessly or without taking counsel with conscience. The 

 tendency to crime is transmitted, stupidity is transmitted, men- 

 tal aberration is transmitted, malice is transmitted, indolence is 

 transmitted, selfishness is transmitted ; but, on the other hand 

 goodness is hereditary, industry is hereditary, mental and physical 

 health are hereditary, conscience and disposition are hereditary, 

 intelligence is hereditary. Training and the experiences of life 

 may more or less develop or arrest the hereditary disposition, but 

 they can never produce or destroy theu^.. Alcohol destroys the 

 gifts of nature in the embryo of the brain, injures all of them 

 and never can improve one iota. 



When the love of a man and a woman for each other 

 awakes a desire to become united for life, they ought never to 

 forget that they are undertaking a very grave responsibility, the 

 responsibility for their future children. They ought to re- 

 nounce marriage rather than to produce physical, or what is 

 much worse, mental cripples. Unfortunately, however, we see 

 noble people with highly gifted natures who carry their pru- 

 dence to so anxious an extreme as not to marry, or at least not 

 to bring forth offspring, while the most frivolous, brutal and 

 stupid, under the protection of lax laws that had their origin in 

 a mistaken humanity, multiply like rabbits and carelessly aban- 

 don their progeny to the state or to public philanthropy — pro- 

 geny made more liable to danger by reason of previous alco- 

 holic excesses. 



And with such false political economy, such mistaken 

 breeding, is it any wonder this increase in the number of men- 

 tally diseased, of lunatic asylums, of a weak eyed proletariat, of 

 morally defective vagabonds and criminals? There is talk of 

 overwork as the occasion of these evils, overlooking the fact 

 that this proletariat mentally never has overworked, but rather 

 has been indolent and useless always. " Nervousness," really 

 brought about by means of mental overwork, forms only a 

 small and comparatively safe fraction, while the great, innumer- 

 able company of mental wrecks nearly always owe their catas- 

 trophe to diseased or defective brain conditions, to excesses, and 

 in enormous percentage, to alcohol. 



It is therefore a duty to consider hereditary conditions. 

 Every respectable woman ought to look for solidity, soberness, 



