404 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1913. 



see certain forms of tuberculosis galloping from the start with such 

 rapid strides that no treatment can check them. Repeated contamina- 

 tion, colonies of bacilli that haA^e crept in, certainly may be the cause 

 of it, yet it is believed that there exist some soils favorable through 

 heredity to the growth and spread of the bacilli. But if children of 

 tuberculous parents are protected as much as possible from infection 

 of the bacilli, we have found that the disease has not developed in 

 them. My teacher, Grancher, believed this, and with that idea he 

 founded the " Oeuvre " for the protection of children against tubercu- 

 losis. That foundation takes children from homes where the sick 

 father or mother by coughing is spreading the bacilli ; it raises these 

 children in peasant's homes in chosen localities in the country. It is 

 demonstrated that these children show a much smaller proportion of 

 tuberculosis than the population taken as a whole. 



In short, in the propagation of microbe diseases in families, hered- 

 ity, properly speaking, plays but a very limited role. The propaga- 

 tion of disease is due to contagion, heredity contagion for certain 

 diseases, but, more often still, common contagion, and this rule 

 apjjlies particularly to tuberculosis. 



I have to speak to you now of another deduction where the dis- 

 eases of parents may affect the condition of the child. When the 

 parents at the time of procreation are in a bad state of health they 

 give birth to children who have what has been called " the defects 

 or scars of degeneracy." This is not really inherited, for it shows 

 no resemblance between parents and children. On the contrary, the 

 children in these cases have strayed from the type of people to which 

 their parents belong; they develop abnormal characters, which show 

 that thejr are different from the usual conformation of their race 

 and species, and even that of the normal human being. This is the 

 literal significance of the word " degeneracy.'' 



It is degeneracy, for example, which is seen in descendants of 

 drunkards. The question is really not one of heredity, but of pre- 

 cocious intoxication from a germ or, to state it better, from sexual 

 cells which are developed in a manner modified in their normal com- 

 position by alcoholic impregnation. All kinds of intoxication act 

 the same — intoxication from opium or morphine, the professional 

 intoxication from tobacco (from workmen in tobacco manufactories), 

 or from lead (worlmien employed in the making of red or white 

 lead). A proof that intoxication from the germ is the cause of it 

 rather than heredity is that intoxications in youth show the same 

 result. Early alcoholism develops vices analogous to those due to 

 alcoholism in the parents; chronic microbe diseases succeed, like intox- 

 ication, in sei'iously affecting the internal life. Syphilis in the parents 

 ( even when it has ceased to be contagious, which seems to prove that 

 the microbe is no longer the cause of it) may also produce " degene- 



