90 Heredity. 



m. 



If from propensities which, in their origin at least, are purely 

 physical, we pass to the consideration of more complex passions, 

 independent, or rather seemingly so, of the organism for example, 

 gambling, avarice, theft, and murder we shall find these also 

 subject to the law of heredity. 



The passion for play often attains such a pitch of madness as 

 to be a form of insanity, and, like it, transmissible. 'A lady of my 

 acquaintance,' says Da Gama Machado, 'and who possessed a 

 large fortune, had a passion for gambling, and passed whole nights 

 at play. She died young, of pulmonary disease. Her eldest son, 

 who was very like his mother, had the same passion for play. He, 

 too, like his mother, died of consumption, and at about the same 

 age. His daughter, who resembled him, inherited the same taste, 

 and died young.' l 



Avarice produces the same consequences. 'In several instances,' 

 says Maudsley, 2 in his Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, l in 

 which the father has toiled upwards from poverty to vast wealth, 

 with the aim and hope of founding a family, I have witnessed 

 the results in a mental and physical and mental degeneracy, which 

 has sometimes gone as far as the extinction of the family in the 

 third or fourth generation. When the evil is not so extreme as 

 madness or ruinous vice, the savour of a mother's influence 

 having been present, it may still be manifest in an instinctive 

 cunning and duplicity, and an extreme selfishness of nature a 

 nature not having the capacity of a true moral conception or 

 altruistic feeling. Whatever opinion other experimental observers 

 may hold, I cannot but think that the extreme passion for getting 

 rich, absorbing the whole energies of a life, does predispose to 

 mental degeneration in the offspring, either to moral defect, or 

 to intellectual and moral deficiency, or to outbreaks of positive 

 insanity under the conditions of life.' 



The heredity of the tendency to thieving is so generally admitted 

 that it would be superfluous to bring together here facts which 

 abound in every record of judicial proceedings. One, but that 

 decisive, may be cited from Dr. Despine's Psychologic Naturdle, 

 the genealogy of the Chretien family. 



1 Da Gama Machado, p. 142. 2 Maudsley, p. 234. 



