58 THE TREND OF THE RACE 
uct of specific neurotoxins, it is at present impossible to say. 
There is little in the symptoms of insanity that would lead us to 
conclude that it is the expression of mere weakness or lack of 
something, any more than is rheumatism or the gout. 
It is one of the unfortunate influences of the presence-absence 
theory that it leads people to jump to the conclusion that traits 
may be due to absences and hence recessive when there is no clear 
evidence of this from the facts in hand. Imperfect dominance is 
sufficiently plentiful among organisms in general to make us 
expect it more or less frequently in the inheritance of neuropathic 
traits. Davenport and Weeks, as we have seen, conclude that it 
occurs in the transmission of epilepsy and related neuroses. An 
examination of the charts in Rosanoff and Orr’s paper on the 
inheritance of insanity shows that all the facts may plausibly be 
interpreted according to the same hypothesis. The frequency 
with which the matings of normal and neuropathic parents 
produce neuropathic offspring is rather better in accord with this 
view. On the assumption of complete recessiveness Rosanoff and 
Orr are led to the view that over 31 per cent of apparently normal 
people are carriers of neuropathic defect. In most of the cases 
given by Rosanoff and Orr where the mating of a normal and a 
neuropathic resulted in neuropathic offspring, it was not possible 
to show that the normal parent was in fact heterozygous; he was 
simply assumed to be so on account of the character of the off- 
spring. It is evident that if neuropathic traits are imperfectly 
dominant, or not completely recessive (which is the same thing) 
it is not necessary to assume that the heterozygous condition is 
nearly so prevalent. Matings of apparently normal stock with 
one that is neuropathic are so often followed by unfortunate 
results that one is naturally led to suspect that a partial blending 
or direct contamination, is a phenomen of common occurrence. 
THE ALLEGED PRINCIPLE OF ‘‘ANTEDATING”’ OR ‘‘ANTICIPATION’’ 
Dr. F. W. Mott has pointed out what he considers to be a 
principle of general application in neuropathic inheritance, 
