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 ina 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 Bicétre 
and la Salpétriére, that the condition of none of those suf- 
ferers could be charged upon the effect of consanguinity. 
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