PREPOTENCY IN CHARACTERS. 61 



it is almost certain to appear, but it rarely attacks 

 every child, for the reason that before the predis- 

 position to disease has gained sufficient fixity in the 

 family to accomplish this, the family is extinct. Thus 

 the end of insanity regularly transmitted in a family 

 is, as Morel has shown, sterile idiocy. Inter- marriage 

 of those in whom the liability to phthisis is extreme, 

 though often fruitful, seldom enriches posterity. The 

 children of the deeply scrofulous are mostly carried 

 off in infancy and childhood, or drag out a miserable 

 existence, the inmates of idiot and imbecile asylums. 

 Epilepsy and drunkenness lead to early and violent 

 deaths, insanity, idiocy, and extinction, while the 

 instinctive criminal is the unfortunate representative 

 of a decaying race. In these cases the predisposi- 

 tion to disease has taken such hold upon the organism, 

 that the opportunity offered for reversion is not 

 sufficient to induce that desirable change. The in- 

 dividual is brought forth un suited to his surround- 

 ings, and consequently succumbs. That equilibrium 

 between creature and environment of which we have 

 spoken has been lost, and a continuance of the family 

 has become impossible. 



Nevertheless, there are some hereditary diseases 

 which are handed down through a sufficient number 

 of generations to gain a considerable prepotency. The 

 first among these is gout; rheumatism is another in 

 which prepotency is often attained. In some families 

 gout has gained such fixity, that it appears in almost 

 every member of the male line, generation after gene- 



