62 MARRIAGE AND DISEASE. 



ration, and this is to be accounted for by the fact that 

 although gout entails considerable suffering upon its 

 victims, it rarely proves fatal until long after the 

 procreative period has been reached. The untainted 

 blood introduced from time to time is rarely sufficient 

 to rid the family of the disease, because the mode of 

 life which first induced the abnormal condition is 

 persisted in. Here we have a good example of the 

 action of a constant environment acting in opposition 

 to the principle of reversion. "When the man who 

 has inherited gout marries a member of a healthy 

 family, the vis medicatrix naturae has only half a chance, 

 so to speak, for while the introduction of untainted 

 blood offers opportunity for reversion in the offspring 

 to the healthy type, the man rarely changes his mode 

 of life, that is, the environment favourable to the 

 abnormal character continues, and so the pathological 

 variation is transmitted, mitigated, it may be, by par- 

 tial reversion in consequence of the " cross," but still 

 sufficiently potent to ensure, with the aid of the 

 constant environment, its reappearance in the next 

 generation. Like every other hereditary disease, gout 

 is a degeneration, and although it often runs long in 

 a family, there can be no doubt that if the environment 

 favourable to it be maintained, it will ultimately 

 attain the necessarily fatal type, and it is certain 

 that to this hereditary degeneration must be attributed 

 the extinction of many branches of our aristocratic 

 and well-to-do families. 



But it is not among the rapidly fatal class of hereditary 



