Heredity of the Sentiments and the Passions. 93 



knocked her down, strangled her, threw her body into a field at a 

 distance from the road, took the thirty sous, and went on to the 

 village feast to spend the money and enjoy himself. 



The innate, incurable taste for a vagabond life shown so 

 strikingly in inferior races, and in the gypsies, is also unquestion- 

 ably a consequence of heredity. These facts will be considered 

 from the social standpoint in the fourth part of this work. 



The conclusion, perhaps unexpected, to which we are led by all 

 the foregoing arguments, is this that insanity very much resembles 

 passion ; and this statement is to be taken in the strict sense of 

 the words. The common opinion readily enough admits that 

 both obscure the intellect and paralyze the will, but is loth to 

 admit that a violent passion is, in its generating causes, identical 

 with insanity. When, however, we read judicial records, and 

 especially medical annals, in search of facts to show the heredity 

 of homicide, theft, or alcoholism, then, side by side, with the some- 

 what homogeneous facts wherein we see the passions of ancestors 

 transmitted in identical form to descendants, we find other hetero- 

 geneous facts, in which what is passion in the former becomes 

 insanity in the latter, and vice versa. Such facts are very 

 numerous. We have not cited any of these, though they are 

 excellent instances of heredity. As we restrict ourselves to facts 

 that are absolutely incontestable, we have put aside from con- 

 sideration the whole question of heredity by metamorphosis. 



We do not maintain that every violent passion or every crime 

 is only a variety of insanity, but only that in many cases the 

 conditions which produce both are identical. ' Nothing in Nature 

 is limited and isolated : all things are connected together by 

 intermediate links, which attentive observation sooner or later 

 discovers, where, at first glance, they were not even suspected. It 

 were to be wished, in the interest of science, that inquiries should 

 be made as to the progenitors of criminals for at least two or three 

 generations. This would be an excellent means of demonstrating 

 the kinship which exists between those cerebral infirmities which 

 produce the psychic anomalies leading to crime, and the patho- 

 logical affections of the nerve centres, particularly the brain. The 

 fact, demonstrated by Drs. Ferrus and Le'lut, that insanity is much 

 more frequent among criminals than other persons, goes far to 



