;6 MARRIAGE AND DISEASE. 



the one hand, or when, on the other, a man generally 

 temperate, but in a temporary debauch, places himself 

 under the power of this law of heredity, the specific 

 or initial principle acts just as surely to produce an 

 inheritance of evil, as it does in the opposite case to 

 produce an inheritance of good." This may be a little 

 too poetically expressed, still it is very near the truth. 

 Whether a temporary elevated or ennobled condition 

 in the parent can override a fixed family viciousness 

 we are not in a position to assert positively, but that 

 a temporary depraved condition can override the best 

 family predisposition we know for a fact, and why 

 this law should not act for good as well as for evil in 

 the race we fail to see. As regards drunkenness, Dr. 

 Maudsley says : " Here, as elsewhere in nature, like 

 produces like; and the parent who makes himself a 

 temporary lunatic or idiot by his degrading vice, pro- 

 pagates his kind in procreation, and entails on his 

 children the curse of the most hopeless fate." 



That drunkenness and other vicious temporary con- 

 ditions in the parent, when he becomes such, have a 

 powerful influence for evil upon the child begotten, has 

 long been known amongst the people, and of its truth 

 some proofs have recently been collected. Cases are by 

 no means rare in which a temporarily drunken parent 

 has begotten an idiot child. Indeed, several observers 

 have collected statistics which go to prove that the 

 vast majority of idiots and imbeciles, who are not the 

 result of a family degeneration, are the children of 

 drunken and otherwise vicious parents, and it would 



