24 



(Fig. 10.) It would have been a national calamity had the former not been 

 allowed to propagate j to cut off the lines of propagation in the latter would 

 have been a national benefit. The popular expression, " He comes from a 

 good stock or a bad stock," then, is the result of experience and quite 

 scientific according to the laws of ancestral inheritance, yet now and then 

 even from an apparently unknown or even bad stock a great man arises. 

 Are we to say that^because a parent is insane that therefore the children 

 must necessarily be insane or useless to the race? God forbid ! The 

 parents of some of the most eminent men became insane and genius with 

 insanity frequently occurs in the same stock indicative of a variation from 

 the normal average. V. 



The great point in any scientific investigation is not to try and prove some- 

 thing, and to avoid any propagandist tendency ; thus the question of alcohol 

 and insanity is an illustration in point. The Council of Fifty in Massachu- 

 setts investigated the number of patients admitted to asylums in which there 

 was an alcoholic history ; it was then suggested that they might investigate the 

 number of total abstainers, it was found that they were as numerous. 

 The scientific way to approach this question is to carefuly investigate the 

 pedigrees of patients admitted, selected not because they show a large number 

 of members of the ancestral stocks as being degenerate or insane, but selected 

 because a complete family history can be obtained for three generations. 



This has been most successfully done by Dr. Hill Wilson White, 

 formerly at the Manor Asylum. The pedigrees he has obtained show con- 

 clusively that we must judge the right of a patient to propagate who has 

 had an attack of insanity by a full consideration of his pedigree. Certain 

 pedigrees which I have are of interest in relation to the question of alcohol ; 

 they are numerically insufficient to draw any conclusions, all we can say is 

 they are indicative of a devitalisation of the germ when chronic poisoning 

 occurs in successive generations. (Figs. 7, 14.) 



Statistics Relating to 3,118 Relatives. 



They show the following facts : 



1. In the insane offspring of insane parents, daughters are much more 

 numerous than sons. 



2. Amongst insane members of the same family (brothers and sisters) 

 sisters are more numerous than brothers. 



This may be correlated with the fact that more women are in asylums 

 than men. There are several reasons for this : general paralysis, which 

 is a fatal disease, is three times more frequent in men than in women ; the 

 recoveries in women do not bear the same proportion as in men. Now, 

 why should women be more liable to become insane than men ? I will briefly 

 summarize the causes which, in my opinion, are operative : 



i. The physiological emergencies connected with reproduction, i.e.* the 



