“B02 PROCEEDINGS OF THE SECTIONS. 
4th. That whilst there is abundant evidence that the chief 
varieties of mental malady are themselves transmissible, nervous 
disorders are often transformed in their transmission, and that the 
metamorphoses of heredity are perplexing. A family whose head 
has died insane or epileptic does not of necessity consist of luna- 
tics and epileptics but the children may be idiots, paralytics, or 
scrofulous. What the father transmits is not insani a 
vicious ae aera which manifests itself under various ‘forms ; 
or, to quote orel*_“‘ We do not mean exclusively by heredity 
the ve sidghai int of the parents transmitted to the children, 
with the identical symptoms observed in the progenitors, but the 
transmission of organic dispositions. ‘Peychologiste have frequent 
degeneracy, and terminate in the idiocy or imbecility of those who 
form the last link in the chain of hereditary transmission.” 
5th. That unions between blood relations influence idiocy an 
imbecility more than they do the co a forms of insanity, or 
those which show themselves after childhoo 
The fourth group is an interesting one, as oa to raise the 
question of the influence of consanguineous marriage ; but I am 
inclined to think that the cases in no wa militate against the 
conclusions oie at by Huth, in his elaborate volume on the 
marriage of near kin, which may ’be thus briefly state 
Consanguineous marriages, by the mere fact of consanguinity, 
living under healthy conditions, an ose families are perfectly 
healthy, the children born will srobably be healthy. 
In addition to the facts stated in proof of this conclusion in 
Huth’s work, I may mention one which has recently come to my 
knowledge. In 1858 two families named Young, numbering sixteen 
in all, descended from the mutineers of the “Bounty” and their 
Otaheetian wives, returned from Norfolk Island to their old home 
‘at Pitcairn. The children were all first cousins on their father’s 
side, and their parents were all closely related. In 1863 a further 
number of inhabitants on Pitcairn had risen from sivas to oe 
the increase being, with two or three exceptions, due to Bieter me 
