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to his country and married ; his wife bore him a son, one of 

 whose eyes was quite dried up, so that he was monoculous 

 like his father ! Congenital blindness may run in families, 

 and blind persons will sometimes beget blind children. A 

 blind beggar was the father of four sons and a daughter, all 

 blind. Dufau, in his work on blindness, cites the cases of 

 twenty-one persons blind from birth, or soon after, whose 

 ancestors father, mother, grandparents, and uncles had 

 some serious affection of the eyes. 1 While amaurosis, 

 nyctalopia, and cataract in the parents may become blind- 

 ness in the children, they are each transmissible, and 

 amaurosis, although not perhaps so frequently transmitted 

 as the other two affections, is yet by no means unknown. 

 Cataract is very frequently inherited, and Cams quotes 

 from Lusardi a case where the children of a man who 

 suffered from cataract were all born with this disease. A 

 remarkable case of inherited nyctalopia, which has been 

 strictly investigated from official documents, and described 

 by Cunier in a pamphlet, may here be quoted. It is shown 

 in this little work that nyctalopia had been propagated during 

 centuries in the same family, from one generation to another, 

 and that of 600 descendants of one ancestor, a great num- 

 ber were afflicted with this evil, so that the same is spread 

 over Vendemian and some other neighbouring places through 

 this family alone. There exists no example of the evil ever 

 having befallen a member of this family where both parents 

 were free of it ; whenever a child was afflicted with it, then 

 surely either his father or his mother had had the same 

 complaint. It is further proved that the complaint was, in 

 the greater number of cases, inherited from the father. 2 



1 Ribot. 2 Steinau. 



