10 



and that poet, like Schiller, who ascribes to it the highest and noblest influences, 

 is the most honored. Nevertheless, the ancients personated love as a blind deity. 

 In forming our marriage relations how few are governed by any one of those 

 considerations which has regard to the character of our children. Hence the 

 fact that great minds do not reappear in the children of those gifted with them. 

 This gift is an accident ; an accidental coming together of two tine minds ; and 

 only where these harmonize is there a perpetuation of them in the offspring. 



An exemplification of the power of these rules of descent is seen in the Jew- 

 ish people. Originally of peculiar and rather limited mental powers, by the 

 " in-and-in breeding " as it is called, they have so perpetuated these peculiarities 

 that to-day the Jew is precisely the same being he was in the time of our Sav- 

 iour ; and so he will continue until he intermarries with people of other nations. 

 Then only his mental and physical traits will be changed. 



But the transmission of physical qualities is of not less importance than the 

 mental. The list of inheritable diseases is frightful ; in my judgment, based 

 on long observation, there is not a chronic complaint but is inheritable. And who 

 knows a woman so complete in health as to be free from them? Fashion, in 

 past years, has ruled the sex to so great a destruction of their constitutions, that 

 everywhere, in the country as in the town, there is a universal ill-health. And as 

 to men, it is conceded that the population of the cities would soon decrease were 

 it not for the renewed sources of health that flow into them from the country. 

 Wherefore, then, these deplorable evils 1 



There can be but a single answer. Ignorant of themselves, for want of the 

 study of physiology, nearly every law of health is disregarded. They are 

 overlooked in the marriage union, in the treatment of childhood, in our systems 

 of education, and in the business of life. In early years the child is dressed 

 with sole reference to its appearance, and the glorious sunbeam of so great 

 chemical power over vegetable life, and not less essential to animal development, 

 is sedulously kept from it, lest a tan or a freckle might stain the blanched skin. 

 To economize fuel, our houses are constructed to exclude fresh air, and our food 

 is selected more to please the palate than its adaptation to digestion and the wants 

 of the body. It is eaten with the haste business demands, and not as the na- 

 ture of digestion requires. Thus whilst the nervous system is exhausted by 

 excessive mental application, the blood system which should sustain it, is pois- 

 oned in the food and digestion by which it should be sustained. 



Do our systems of education fit us for the weighty obligations arising from 

 the family relation? I may be told that physiology is now made a school-book. 

 True, but in what way? That which most concerns this relation is excluded. 

 The vital organs are described, but their offices, their mutual sympathies, their 

 relations to the brain and mind, their action in health and their condition in 

 disease that is to say, physiology as a practical good, to direct us in all that re- 

 lates to the body and its relation to the mind, finds no place iii our educational 

 courses. 



Again, upon the mother devolves the first instruction of childhood. Objects 

 are early noticed, and their nature and relation to the infant learned by it. The 

 mother should instruct in these : those about the house, those beyond it, in the 

 gardens and fields and woodlands. But who ever saw a mother out in the open 

 air thus teaching childhood, instilling a love for the beautiful from the flowers 

 and green grass and leafy trees ? from the azure sky, or the soft, gentle winds 

 or the dark-rolling, tempestuous cloud ? At an early age, to get the child " out 

 of her way," it is placed in school, to learn abstract ideas from books and a 

 teacher as little competent as the mother to understand its nature and wants. 



In these errors and defects there are placed before us those studies that should 

 fit the individual for the right discharge of the duties resting upon him from the 

 family relation. They are physiology, psychology, and phrenology, the edu- 

 cation of the family, &c. 



