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transmission of functional and organic predispositions or 

 tendencies from the parens to the partus ; and thus, although 

 the vast majority of characteristics is always inherited, as 

 facts prove, yet the tendency to variability which exists, cor- 

 relatively with heredity in every organic being, necessitates 

 individual differences. This is very clearly stated in the 

 following quotations from the admirable works of two 

 French authors, the first of whom, Dr. Moreau, in his 

 Psychologic Morbide, says: "It shows an incorrect conception 

 of the law of heredity to look for a return of identical 

 phenomena in each new generation. There are some who 

 have refused to subject mental faculties to heredity, because 

 they would have the character and intelligence of the 

 descendants exactly the same as those of the progenitors ; 

 they would have one generation the copy of the other that 

 went before it the father and son presenting the spectacle 

 of one being having two births, and each time leading the 

 same life under the same conditions. But it is not in the 

 identity of functions, or of organic or intellectual facts that 

 we must seek the application of the law of heredity, but at 

 the very fountain-head of the organism in its inmost consti- 

 tution. A family, whose head has died insane or epileptic, 

 does not of necessity consist of lunatics and epileptics ; but 

 the children may be idiots, paralytics, or scrofulous. What 

 the father transmits to the children is not insanity, but a 

 vicious constitution which will manifest itself under various 

 forms, in epilepsy, hysteria, scrofula, rickets. Thus it is 

 that we are to understand hereditary transmission." 



So, too, Dr. Morel, in his Traite des Degemrescences, says :. 

 " We do not mean exclusively by heredity the very complaint 

 of the parents transmitted to the children, with the identical 

 symptoms, both physical and moral, observed in the 



