DEGENERACY. 20/ 



TRANSMISSION OF ACQUIRED DISEASES. 



This shows that hereditary degeneracy may arise in rabbits, 

 from disease acquired by ancestors, and that the degeneracy may 

 take any one of a variety of forms. The same results occur with 

 man when the parent acquires disease or suffers from accidents. 

 Talbot gives 2 a larg^e number of cases of degeneracy occurring 

 among children born after the parents had become inebriates, four 

 after the father had been sunstruck, two where the mother had suf- 

 fered from a railroad accident, two cases where parental nervous 

 exhaustion came from typhoid and typhus fevers, and two others 

 from nerve exhaustion. He also quotes 3 a case reported by Kiernan 

 in which father and mother (both of healthy stock) were overcome 

 by sunstroke which resulted in changing the characters of both. 

 The children born before the sunstroke were healthy, but a year 

 subsequently the woman had triplets, one of which died from con- 

 vulsions soon after birth. The second, a girl, became an epileptic 

 at the age of two, a prostitute at 16, and chronically insane at 20. 

 The third triplet became a puberty lunatic at 16. Of three other 

 children subsequently born, two became epileptic and one a moral 

 imbecile. 



HEALTHY AND UNHEALTHY DEVELOPMENT. 



A deduction from the theory of use-inheritance, especially in 

 view of what has been shown in regard to mental aptitudes, is that 

 degeneracy as well as intellectual strength should appear most com- 

 monly in the children of old parents. But this fact does not give 

 any warrant, as has been assumed by several writers on heredity, for 

 linking great mental ability with degeneracy as kindred abnormali- 

 ties, because one is the result of healthy development and the other 



(2) Degeneracy, p. 106. 



(3) Degeneracy, p. 139. 



