28 Wiscojisin Academy of Sciences^ Arts^ and Letters. 



rational answer, it may be imperfectly and impractically^ to the 

 second branch of this question, to wit : the duty of the state to the 

 unborn generations, with which our successors will have to deal 

 The state establishes a state board of health, to whom it commits 

 the various questions concerning the public health. It requires 

 the individual to conform to such sanitary regulations as are 

 found necessary to protect life, health and property. But is there 

 any more reason why the state should see that offensive and me- 

 phitic vapors and gases should be promptly neutralized by chemi- 

 cal agents, why nuisances should be abated or removed from civ- 

 ilized communities, than there is why the state should interfere to 

 arrest the descent, through long lines of generations, of the germs 

 of incurable diseases, which are sure to become the object of the 

 world's pity when allowed to develop into the full proportions 

 which we witness in our hospitals and public alms houses ? 

 Should it be the province of a state board of health to tell me that 

 my sewers need chloride of lime or carbolic acid, and not be <-heir 

 function to tell me that my posterity will be smitten with incur- 

 able insanity, provided a contemplated marriage is consummated? 

 Should he be allowed to intrude into my back yards and order 

 me to remove the offal, which carries on its loings the pestilence 

 and plague, and yet must not be allowed to have at least some 

 voice in arresting, by counsel or by law, the descent of those con- 

 genital disorders, that prey at an earlier or later date on half the 

 population of the civilized world. 



We take remarkable pains in selecting and crossing breeds of 

 the domestic animals. Here at least we try to study and harmo- 

 nize with the laws of nature. The royal and aristocratic families 

 of Europe are very strict in the marriages of their sons and daugh- 

 ters. We recognize the universal law that physical qualities, 

 character, breeding and education begin long anterior to birth. 

 But junfortunately for the ruling classes of Europe, the primary 

 principle on which their intermarriages are based, is not in respect 

 to the laws of nature. Their idea is a purely conventional one, 

 and their society is purely artificial, where nature and her economy 

 in the processes of reproduction, are as aiuch ignored as with the 

 bulk of mankind elsewhere. Their intermarraiges come from 



