THROWING BACK 111 



respectable family or a poet among brothers and 

 sisters of an unimaginative cast. 



The question of the metamorphoses of heredity is, 

 if possible, still more difficult to treat than reversion. 

 It has, in truth, been little studied, except in connec- 

 tion with disease, but observation, so far as it has 

 gone, points unmistakably to the existence in this, as 

 in other branches of science, of the great principle 

 that "nothing is lost" — that peculiarities of body 

 or mind, when they are not transmitted directly, 

 become transformed in passing from one generation 

 to another. " To look in each new generation for a 

 return of the identical phenomena observed in the 

 preceding one," observes Moreau, " would be to mis- 

 understand the law of heredity. . . . The family of a 

 man who dies insane or epileptic do not necessarily 

 suffer from the same malady ; they may be idiotic, 

 paralytic, or scrofulous. What the parent transmits 

 is not his insanity, but a constitutional defect which 

 may manifest itself under different forms." 



This is particularly noticeable in the case of drunk- 

 ards. "A frequent effect of alcoholism," says the 

 Swedish physiologist Magnus Huss, "is the partial 

 or general atrophy of the brain ; this organ is reduced 

 in size to such an extent as no longer to fill the 



