Exceptions to the Law of Heredity. 211 



Many of the biographical facts there given are not beyond criti- 

 cism, but the following are a few of the most conclusive : 



Frederick William of Prussia was the victim of a sort of insanity. 

 He was an excessive drunkard, eccentric, brutal ; he several times 

 attempted to strangle himself, and at last fell into a profound 

 hypochondria. He was the father of Frederick the Great. 



' We should seek in vain,' says Dr. Moreau, ' for a more striking 

 proof of the relations subsisting between the neuropathic state 

 and certain intellectual and affectional states, than in the family of 

 Peter the Great. Genius of the highest order, imbecility, virtues 

 and vices carried to extremes ; excessive ferocity, ungovernable 

 maniacal outbursts, followed by remorse ; habits of debauch, pre- 

 mature deaths, epileptic attacks all these are found united in the 

 Czar Peter, or in his family.' 



The Condes offer an analogous example. Talent, eccentricity, 

 originality of character, moral perversity, rickets, and insanity, 

 stand side by side, or succeed one another in the most unexpected 

 way. 



We may recall what has been already said of the Pitt family. 

 Lady Hester Stanhope, the Sibyl of the Lebanon, her father Lord 

 Stanhope, her grandfather Lord Chatham, her cousin Lord Camel- 

 ford, and Pitt her uncle, were all remarkable for their genius, their 

 eccentricities, or their extravagances. 



Tacitus had an idiot son. The gloomy Louis XI. was grandson 

 of Charles VI., a lunatic. Hoffmann, author of fantastic stories, 

 had lunatics in his family, and was himself subject to hallucinations. 



If now we quit the ranks of illustrious men, 1 and consider those 

 of common stamp, we shall find in writers on insanity a great 

 many cases of transformations of heredity, in all that concerns the 

 psychical faculties. The lypemania of parents is seen to become 

 a tendency to suicide in the children ; insanity becomes convul- 

 sions or epilepsy, scrofula is replaced by rickets, and vice versd. 



Fixed ideas in the progenitors may become in the descendants 

 melancholy, taste for meditation, aptitude for the exact sciences, 

 energy of will, etc. The mania of progenitors may be changed in 

 the descendants into aptitude for the arts, liveliness of imagination, 



1 For further details see Psychologie Morbide, 3* partie. 



