HEREDITY. 19 



Now the degenerate father of this wretched family 

 most likely owed his arrival at maturity to artificial 

 means. In natural life such a creature, passionate, 

 eccentric, and the brother of a suicide, would in all 

 probability have succumbed to his innate unfitness. 

 We do not know whether, or how often, he was pre- 

 vented by others from carrying out " Nature's remedy," 

 which his sister in a fortunate moment applied, but 

 that his unstable temper and eccentricity would have 

 proved fatal at an early age in natural life we are justi- 

 fied in assuming. That he did not achieve the " con- 

 summation devoutly to be wished " before maturity, or 

 was not prevented begetting his kind, was an unmiti- 

 gated misfortune to himself and to the world. By 

 his life, and the lives of his unfortunate children, the 

 world gained nothing. By his early death or enforced 

 celibacy, what suffering would it have escaped ! But 

 my reason for bringing forward this family history 

 at present was to demonstrate how infantile mortality 

 and sterility are used by Nature to stamp out the unfit. 

 Of this miserable man's six sons, two were happily 

 carried off in infancy. Each of the other four lived to 

 beyond sixty, and all were married. They had amongst 

 them no less than six wives, and there were born to 

 them twelve children ; yet to-day their last and only 

 representative is a wretched, crippled melancholiac, 

 whom Nature has branded with sterility. 



Thus do all hereditarily transmitted diseases, or, more 

 correctly, degenerations, tend to one goal extinction 

 of the family ; and it is only by judicious marriages, 



