LATE MARRIAGES. 259 



some such bodily imperfection as squint, paralysis, 

 cleft-palate, &c., while in the other, the young of 

 the senile, you do not meet with the same complete 

 absence of mental power, nor the same amount of 

 such deformities as club-foot, cleft-palate, paralysis, 

 squint, blindness, &c. 



The distinctive characteristics of the two classes 

 might be roughly summed up as follows: The 

 children of immature parentage are specially liable 

 to death during infancy from wasting, scrofulous, and 

 convulsive affections. They are liable in a remark- 

 able degree to idiocy and imbecility of a low type, 

 and to physical deformities and imperfections. Large 

 numbers of them succumb to tubercular disease about 

 the ages of puberty and adolescence, and few of them 

 attain even advanced middle age. The genital organs 

 are ill-developed and often deformed, and a great 

 number of them are sterile. They are also notorious 

 for their lack of energy and courage. Hence the 

 class of criminals to which they give the greatest 

 number of recruits is that of thieves and other petty 

 offenders. 



The children of the senile are as a class ngly, small 

 of stature and stooping, which, together with the 

 absence of subcutaneous fat, gives them a look of 

 old age while still young. Idiocy is less common 

 amongst them than weak-mindedness amounting to 

 imbecility, which is often accompanied with more or 

 less perversion of moral feeling, and a plentiful supply 

 of deep low cunning. Many of them die between 



