48 MARRIAGE AND DISEASE. 



to either parent, and the offspring will revert to the 

 original stock. 



It must here be pointed out that in thus referring 

 to reversion to the healthy type as following the inter- 

 marriage of individuals belonging to different varieties, 

 all degenerate conditions must be taken as belonging 

 to the same variety. The more closely such degenerate 

 conditions as epilepsy, insanity, scrofula, drunken- 

 ness, cancer, and crime are inquired into, the clearer 

 it becomes that they are not only related, but that 

 they are largely interchangeable. For this reason the 

 intermarriage of so apparently unlike temperaments 

 as the cancerous and insane, the cancerous and 

 scrofulous, or the insane and rheumatic, seldom or 

 never result in reversion to the healthy type. Unions 

 of this kind are almost, if not quite, as dangerous to 

 the offspring as those of individuals belonging to 

 families in which the family degeneration has taken 

 exactly the same outward form. 



We shall see later that such apparently distinct 

 degenerate characters as epilepsy, insanity, cancer, 

 rheumatism, gout, and scrofula, are in reality but the 

 varying outward signs of a common constitutional 

 depravity, and that they constantly replace one another 

 in succeeding generations of the deteriorating family, 

 and even in different members of the same generation. 



The following family history of a patient of my own 

 is a good example of how the outward signs of family 

 nnfitness may vary in the different members of the 

 family : 



