360 NATURE AND LIFE. 



persons themselves, is but the secondary point in these 

 cases ; the main one is to prevent the transmission of these 

 germs to new generations. To be certain of this result, it 

 is important not only to make those marriages conformed 

 to the laws of health and of morality easier and more 

 common, but, still further, to thwart such unions as can only 

 produce children wretched in body and mind. Physicians 

 should use all their influence to forbid marriage between 

 two persons both with strong constitutional tendencies 

 toward the various nerve-disorders, toward tubercles, scrof- 

 ula, etc. When one of two such persons has morbid he- 

 reditary antecedents, the physician should at least urge 

 the necessity of union between the unsound person and a 

 husband or wife in a perfect state of health, of superior 

 strength and sexuality, and, above all, different in temper- 

 ament. In this way we should at least lessen those 

 chances of hereditary contamination to which it would be 

 far better not to expose one's offspring at all. This is too 

 delicate a subject to be urged here. Yet something should 

 be said of marriages between blood relations, which have 

 occasioned warm controversies of late years. Some phy- 

 sicians and anthropologists, Broca and Bertillon among the 

 rest, maintain that the purest and least mixed races resist 

 causes of degeneracy better than crossed races. In their 

 view, the bad results attributed to consanguinity depend 

 on agencies altogether foreign to it, mainly upon ancestral 

 hereditary disorders. Trousseau and Boudin, on their side, 

 maintain that unions between persons of the same family 

 often produce unsound offspring, insane, and idiotic. The 

 discussion seems at the present time to be settled in favor 

 of the partisans of the former opinion. Quite lately, again, 

 Auguste Voisin decided, after inquiring among the con- 

 nections of more than fifteen hundred patients at Bice"tre 

 and la Salpetriere, that the condition of none of those suf- 

 ferers could be charged upon the effect of consanguinity. 



