94 Heredity. 



prove that crime and insanity are closely connected/ 1 The 

 number of criminals whose ancestors have given signs of insanity 

 is very great. Verger, the assassin of the Archbishop of Paris, was 

 of this number. His mother and one of his brothers perished, 

 prior to his crime, the victims of suicidal mania. 



Dr. Bruce Thompson, in his recent work on The Hereditary Nature 

 of Crime, adopts this conclusion, and supports it by figures. Of 

 5,432 prisoners, he found 673 whose mental state appeared to him 

 to be unsound, though, according to the general opinion, they 

 were not subjects for a lunatic asylum. Out of 904 convicts in 

 prison at Perth, 440 were recommitted, thus showing the fatal 

 power of the passions. In a house of detention there were 109 

 prisoners belonging to only 50 families ; among them were eight 

 members of one family, and several families were represented by 

 two or three members. 



It is beyond our purpose to inquire to what extent passion 

 shares in the fatal character of insanity, or to ascertain the 

 practical consequences of this. The argument simply shows that 

 (i) passions which are inexplicable, so long as they are studied in 

 the isolated individual, find their explanation so soon as we have 

 studied them in their metamorphoses through generations, and 

 brought them under the great law of heredity ; (2) that passion is 

 so near insanity that the two forms of heredity are really one : so 

 that the preceding section is, as it were, a chapter, detached and 

 in advance, on morbid heredity. 



CHAPTER VII. 



HEREDITY OF THE WILL. 

 I. 



THE title given to this chapter is hardly exact, and is only 

 selected for want of a better. Yet it seems to us that in the 

 statesmen and great soldiers of whom we are about to speak, the 

 will must be regarded as the dominant faculty. They must, no 



1 Despine, Psychologic Naturelle, ii. 983. 



