2io Heredity. 



tacle o'f 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 constitution. 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.' 



Dr. Morel, in his Traite des Degenerescences, published at about 

 the same time, says in much the same terms : 



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 progenitors. By the 

 term heredity we understand the transmission of organic dis- 

 positions from parents to children. Mad doctors have, perhaps, 

 more frequent occasion than others for observing this hereditary 

 transmission, as also the various transformations which are ex 

 hibited in the descendants. They are aware that a simple neuro- 

 pathic state of the parents may produce in the children an organic 

 disposition which will result in mania or melancholy nervous 

 affections which in turn may give rise to more serious degeneracy, 

 and terminate in the idiocy or imbecility of those who form the 

 last links in the chain of hereditary transmission/ 



Speaking of the young inmates of houses of correction, Dr. 

 Legrand du Saulle calls attention to an entire category among 

 them of ' creatures who are whimsical, irritable, violent, with little 

 intelligence, refractory, ungovernable and incorrigible.' These are 

 the children ' sometimes of old men, blood relations, drunkards, 

 epileptics, or lunatics. Sometimes, and this is the more frequent 

 case, their father is unknown, and their mother is scrofulous, 

 rickety, hysterical, a prostitute, or a lunatic.' l 



In the Psychologic Morbide will be found several cases of the 

 transformation of heredity, taken from pathology and from history. 



1 Gazette des Hopitaux, 6 Oct. 1867. 



