INBREEDING. 101 



undoubtedly Soter I, the first of them all, and 

 next to him Philadelphus, whose mother was 

 unrelated to his father. And the lovely and 

 vigorous queen who brought this incestuous 

 and ignoble line to a fitting close was barren 

 when married to her brothers and only bore 

 the sickly and short-lived Csesarion, the child of 

 CaBsar, in all her amours. Set over against this 

 record that of the outbred members of the 

 family. Philip II, of whom Cicero said in look- 

 ing back over his career, that he was "always 

 great" though cut off at the early age of forty- 

 seven by a violent death, links Alexander, who 

 died at thirty-two, and Ptolemy Soter I, his 

 sons, and Pyrrhus, his cousin, one of the great- 

 est generals and statesmen of antiquity, in a 

 relationship of vigor and ability which makes 

 the poor residuum of their noble blood to be 

 found in the Ptolemies no better than the lees 

 of the wine. 



Outside of these notable cases, the verdict 

 of humanity is against the intermarriage of 

 near relations. I have seen in my own obser- 

 vation many cases in which it was unques- 

 tionably true that too close intermarriage had 

 resulted in physical decay in the offspring. I 

 have in mind at this moment as I write cases 

 of idiocy, consumption, scrofula, diminished 

 size and impaired vitality, infertility, and re- 

 duced, almost destroyed, fecundity, growing out 



