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ignorance we cannot say whether they are or are not. If 

 the views enunciated in the foregoing pages 'have anything 

 to support them, we should have no difficulty in under- 

 standing why gall-stones should be hereditary, like other 

 morbid results, and we can only trust that time and experience 

 will ultimately clear the way from every doubt, either one 

 way or the other. Icterus or jaundice is also hereditary; 

 thus Kerkring mentions an example of a woman afflicted 

 with jaundice, being delivered in the eighth month of her 

 pregnancy of a still-born child, whose very bones had a 

 yellow colour. This case seems to support the views of such 

 pathologists as Hartmann, Conradi, and others, who believe 

 that in many cases, instead of a mere predisposition com-^ 

 municated by the parents to their children, the disease itself 

 is inherited ; and they appeal to experience, by which it is 

 proved, as they allege, that many children are born with 

 diseases under which their parents suffered. We must 

 acknowledge that deformities generally, and especially 

 anomalies in the external parts, as varus, sex-digitism, also 

 diseases of the eye, especially cataract, if inherited are 

 brought into the world with the children ; but, on the other 

 hand, in the majority of so-called internal diseases, a predis- 

 position only is more frequently inherited. Probably the true 

 explanation may be found in the following circumstances 

 viz., that with respect to the majority of internal diseases, it 

 often depends upon the more or less high stage to which the 

 disease has arisen in the parents, whether they communicate 

 to their children merely a predisposition, or the disease 

 itself. How it happens, however, that sometimes the 

 predisposition only, and sometimes the disease itself, is 

 communicated, must, like many other questions, for the 

 present remain unanswered. In addition to the case of 



