I2Q 



its special factor through many successive generations." 

 That acquired predispositions tend to produce themselves in 

 the offspring is proved by the fact, evidenced by the same 

 authority, that the effect of habitual alcoholic excess 

 not only produces a tendency to insanity in the subject of 

 it, but also engenders in the offspring (especially when both 

 parents are drunkards) a disordered state of brain-nutrition, 

 which may express itself in idiocy, epilepsy, alcoholic 

 craving, mental instability , weakness of will, incontrollable 

 hysteria, and the like, as well as insanity. And the same 

 may be said of abnormal moral habits, which, when they 

 have fixed themselves in the cerebral organism, tend to 

 reproduce themselves in succeeding generations, as we see 

 in hereditary kleptomania. 



Dr. Bastian says : " It is now a well-established fact 

 that persons who are endowed with a neurotic habit of 

 body, very frequently transmit a similar tendency to their 

 children. It is not a tendency to any one particular disease, 

 but a vulnerability of the nervous system as a whole which 

 is transmitted, so that under the influence of even a 

 comparatively slight strain, this weakness may manifest itself 

 in one or other of various ways. It may reveal itself 

 by mere general nervousness or tremors, by attacks 

 of chorea, by epilepsy, or by one or other of the forms 

 of insanity." This quotation refers to the now well- 

 established neuropathic predisposition, which may be either 

 inherited or acquired, and which is a factor of prime 

 importance in the etiology of such neuroses as the psychoses, 

 chorea, epilepsy, hysteria, hypochondriasis, etc. By this 

 term we understand a pathological constitution affecting the 

 functional activity of the nervous system (Griesinger), in 

 consequence of which those subject to its influence 

 exhibit throughout their lives the utmost variety of symp- 



