32 THE JUKES. 



grows into larger and more momentous proportions the more mi- 

 nutely we look into it. 



In chart II. the following five cases in consanguineous stock 

 can be traced and compared. 



Case 7. Line i, generation 3, (2) 1. m. A., the progenitor, was 

 a volunteer in 1812, a very licentious man, who contracted ma- 

 lignant syphilis in the army before his marriage to his cousin. 

 This disease he entailed upon his eight children, seven of them 

 girls, and the combined effects of it and the consanguinity of the 

 parentage have produced marked social effects. He was twice an 

 inmate of the same alms-house, at 45 and at 52. 



Case 8. Line 24, generation 4, was his daughter, a congenital 

 idiot. At eight she drifted into the poor-house and remained there 

 eight years. Whether she was removed or died the imperfect 

 records do not show : she is probably dead. Here the correlation 

 between the physical and social condition is established. It is a case 

 of absolute hereditary pauperism, the entailment depending on dis- 

 ease in one generation producing cerebral atrophy in the next ; for 

 idiocy has been described as " arrest of development," * chiefly of 

 the brain and of the nervous system, proceeding from insufficient 

 nutrition during ante-natal life, and brought about by diverse causes, 

 the most frequent of which is scrofulous or syphilitic disease in the 

 parents. Pauperism here stands as the social equivalent of disease, 

 which is a form of weakness. 



Case 9. Line 3, generation 5, is another case of alms-house 

 pauperism two removes from the grandfather, whose licentiousness 

 is the original cause of this condition. This girl's mother, an elder 

 sister of the above idiot, is tainted so deeply with constitutional 

 syphilis that she is weak-minded and blind. Six out of eight of 

 her children died young, and the vitality of the two surviving girls 

 was impaired. Here, inheritable disease precedes, pauperism 

 follows, a generation having been skipped, that overleaped genera- 

 tion itself surely gravitating to the poor-house. Tracing the envi- 

 ronment we find the example of licentiousness in each generation^ 



* Idiocy, etc., Edward Seguin, N. Y.. 1866, pp. 40, 41. 



