CONSANGUINITY 131 



notorious Ninon de TEuclos made violent love to his 

 mother until she disclosed her identity, of which he 

 had been ignorant, whereupon he shot himself dead ; 

 and Huth mentions the case of a Turkish pasha who 

 discovered by chance that one of his wives — originally, 

 like himself, a Circassian slave — was his own sister. 



Of recent years the question of the effects of con- 

 sanguinity in marriage, supposed to have been settled 

 by the collective experience of the world, has been 

 reopened by scientific men, notably by George Darwin, 

 son of the eminent naturalist, and A. H. Huth, the 

 latter of whom has sought to demonstrate by the 

 most exhaustive research that the reputed evils of 

 consanguineous unions are fanciful,^ George Darwin 

 calculates that in England the proportion of consan- 

 guineous marriages to marriages in general bears no 

 excessive relation to the number of afflicted children. 

 Pursuing a more extended line of inquiry, Huth 

 declares that small and isolated communities in 

 which consanguineous unions abound are not specially 

 subject to physical or mental disorders; and that 

 as regards sterility, marriages between cousins are 

 actually more prolific than others, the parties being 

 usually married young. 



^ Huth's Maniage of Near Kin. 



