A FAMILY OF DEGENERATES. 



By Dr. W. J. RUTHERFURD. 



The following extraordinary family history affords 

 food for thought. The common ancestor, a work- 

 ing-man of whose antecedents nothing is now known, 

 married twice, and his descendants by each marriage 

 have proved themselves so markedly abnormal that 

 it would seem highly probable he must have been 

 the common source of the tainted stock. 



By the first marriage he had six children. The 

 oldest, a son, fortunately did not marry. The 

 second child, a daughter, married, and had six 

 children, and in a family epidemic of dii)htheria* 

 no less than four of them died. The next, also a 

 daughter, died of apoplexy when sixty-two years old. 

 The fourth was a son, who married, and had six 

 children, the two oldest of Avhom have families of 

 their own. This man got hold of a dynamite 

 cartridge one day, and thought it would be "a nice 

 sort of toy" to give to one of his children when he 

 got home ; so he gave it to his eleven-year-old son, 

 who thereupon " played with it " with fatal results. 

 The next son in this first family died of apoplexy, 

 leaving one daughter, who is now about fourteen 

 years old. The last of the six children was a daughter, 

 who died in childbirth, probably, as the sequel 



* An illness the poison of which exerts a specially damaging effect 

 upon the nervous structures, especially if these are already not of the 

 most robust. 



